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Update on Intel NUC 7th Gen (Kaby Lake) & ESXi 6.x

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Intel just started shipping their i3 7th Gen (Kaby Lake) Intel NUCs and no surprise, Florian of virten.net has already gotten his hands on a unit for testing. The Intel NUCs is a very popular platform for running vSphere/vSAN-based home labs, especially for their price point and footprint. Last week, Florian discovered from his testing that the built-in network adapter on the 7th Gen NUC was not being detected by any of the ESXi installers and had published his findings here.

Since the Intel NUC is not an officially supported platform for ESXi, it does not surprise me that these sort of things happen, even if the NUC had a pretty good track record going back to the 5th Gen releases. Nonetheless, I reached out to Florian to see if he can provide me with a vm-support bundle and see if there was anything I could do to help.

A couple of Engineers took a look and quickly identified the issue with the Kabylake NIC (8086:15d8) but before getting to the solution, I did want to clarify something. The Kabylake NIC is actually NOT an officially supported NIC for ESXi and although it currently shows up in the VMware HCL, it is a mistake. I have been told the VMware HCL will be updated shortly to reflect this, apologies for any confusion that this may have caused.

Ok, so the great news is that we do have a solution for getting ESXi to recognize the built-in NIC on the 7th Gen Intel NUCs. The semi-bad news is that we currently do not have a solution in the short term for any released version of ESXi, as the fix will require an updated version of the e1000e Native Driver which will only be available in a future update of ESXi. I can not provide any timelines, but keep an eye on this blog and I will publish more details once they are available.

In the meantime, if you already own a 7th Gen NUC, there is a workaround which Florian has already blogged about here which uses the USB Ethernet Adapter VIB for the initial ESXi installation. If you are planning to purchase the 7th Gen NUC and would like to wait for folks to confirm the fix, then I would recommend holding off or potentially looking at the 6th Gen if you can not wait. Thanks to Florian and others who shared their experiences with the 7th Gen NUC and also to the VMware Engineers who found a quick resolution to the problem.

UPDATE (07/27/17) - The updated e1000e Native Driver that was included in ESXi 6.0 Update 3 is now included in ESXi 6.5 Update 1 which just GA'ed. You should be able to install ESXi without require any additional modifications to the latest Intel NUCs.

UPDATE (02/24/17) - An updated e1000e driver which contains a fix for 7th Gen NUC is now available as part of ESXi 6.0 Update 3, below are several options in how you can consume the driver.

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Using the vSphere API in vCenter Server to collect ESXTOP & vscsiStats metrics

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Back in 2013, I wrote two articles here and here on how to use the Service Manager API that was introduced in vSphere 5.1 to remotely collect ESXTOP and vscsiStats metrics. At the time, I was told that this API was only available when connecting directly to an ESXi host using the vSphere API. This was still a huge improvement over the previous method which basically required customers to run the commands locally. For ESXTOP, there was resxtop but it was not available for all platforms and some customers still prefer to use the ESXi Shell's version. When I had learned about this API, I was really hoping I could collect both ESXTOP & vscsiStats metrics using vCenter Server which would remove the need to have direct connectivity to each ESXi host.

Last week, an Engineer came across one of my blog posts related to the Service Manager APIs which helped him with a problem he was trying to solve. In the email conversation, I then came to learn from the Engineer that the the Service Manager API can be used from vCenter Server and going directly to the ESXi host was not necessary. It turns out that the QueryServiceList() method which accepts an array of "location" expects a special keyword prefix appended to the list of ESXi hosts that you wish to use the local Service Manager instances on.

The special keyword prefix is "vmware.host." and this is appended to either the Hostname or IP Address of the ESXi hosts being managed by the vCenter Server. For example, in my environment I have an ESXi host (192.168.1.50) that is managed by my VC and so the location string for that host should be "vmware.host.192.168.1.50". If the method was successfully called, you should get back the two service instances for ESXTOP and vscsiStats for each of the ESXi hosts where you can then perform the metric collection.

I have created two sample pyvmomi scripts which exercises the Service Manager API for ESXTOP and vscsiStats:

Note: For more details on how to use Service Manager API to collect ESXTOP and vscsiStats, please refer to this post here and here.

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Exploring new VCSA VAMI API w/PowerCLI: Part 8

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In Part 8, we are going to take a look how services are managed in a VCSA or PSC node which is provided by the vCenter Server Lifecycle Management system also referred to internally as vMon. You can interact with the vMon service using either the service-control utility which is only available via SSH or the VAMI APIs which are available remotely. As you probably have guessed, we will be using the VAMI APIs 🙂

VAMI UI Area of Focus

There is not a service view in the VAMI UI (https://[VCSA]:5480) for either the VCSA or PSC. However, this information is available as part of the VAMI information when logged into the vSphere Web Client by navigating to System Configuration->Nodes->Related Objects or System Configuration->Services.

VAMI APIs Used

  • GET /appliance/vmon/service
  • POST /appliance/vmon/service/start
  • POST /appliance/vmon/service/stop

PowerCLI Function

Sample Output

The Get-VAMIService will lists all available services for the given VCSA or PSC node that you are connected to. It provides the exact same output that you would see in the vSphere Web Client such as the name of the service, the current state, the health and whether the service is disabled or configured to start up automatically or manually.


The function also accepts a name parameter if you know the specific service you wish to query, for example here is the syntax for checking the Auto Deploy service which is named rbd:

Get-VAMIService -Name rbd

We can use the Start-VAMISerivce function and given a service name, we can start it as shown in the screenshot below.


Similialy, we can use the Stop-VAMISerivce function and given a service name to stop the service as shown in the screenshot below.