Search Results for: Intel NUC

128GB memory mini PCs is now a reality with 64GB DDR5 SODIMM

02.19.2025 by William Lam // 20 Comments

The long awaited 64GB DDR5 SODIMM memory modules from Crucial was just released this week! ?

I was so excited about the news, I quickly splurged on a pair of these brand new modules, which are currently priced at $364 USD on Amazon! ??

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Interesting VMware Homelab Kits for 2024

10.30.2024 by William Lam // 22 Comments

Where did 2024 go!? I can not believe there is only a few more months left before the end of the year!

During VMware Explore US, I had several folks ask whether I was going to publish a 2024 edition of my annual interesting VMware homelab kit blog post, simliar to HERE and HERE for 2023 and 2023 respectively. While I had planned for this originally, I was pretty busy this year and getting hands on with some of the latest Intel 14th Generation systems did not happen until much later and hence why I had not put anything together.

I was recently reminded of this request again and it feels like the right time to summarize the various kits that I have come across and/or have gotten hands on throughout the year.

Homelab Trends

There are also some interesting trends that I have observed in 2024, especially as it pertains to VMware Homelabs/Development/Testing purposes:

The support for non-binary DDR5 SODIMM memory modules has become the new norm and can enable small form factor systems to get up to 96GB of memory
Intel 14th (Consumer) CPU introduces a third core type (LPE) into its Hybrid architecture which has some implications as mentioned in my review of the ASUS NUC 14 Pro as an example
Having more M.2 NVMe or general NVMe slots will be extremely advantageous with the introduction of vSphere NVMe Memory Tiering capability
OCuLink supported peripherals, especially for external GPU and storage is slowly becoming a reality after its initial introduction in 2012 and may finally give Thunderbolt some competition

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Quick Tip - NVMe Tiering configured but not working?

09.13.2024 by William Lam // 10 Comments

Since publishing my NVMe Tiering in vSphere 8.0 Update 3 is a Homelab game changer blog post, the feedback and responses have been absolutely phenomenal!

It will be just a matter of time until we can start using RAID with NVME Tiering !

When it happens, it will be a HUGR game change!

BTW, I'm already using it on my Lab Environment!!

It's F**** awesome! pic.twitter.com/h6Np972RcQ

— Chris ✈️??????? (@crismsantos) September 4, 2024

In fact, during VMware Explore, I had a number of users share with me in person that they not only updated to vSphere 8.0 Update 3 after learning about the feature but they were extremely happy that they could have their hardware was even more capable with just a software upgrade and workloads varied from general infrastructure VMs to the full VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) stack.

Right before VMware Explore, I did have a couple of users who reported that after successfully configuring NVMe Tiering and rebooting their ESXi host, they noticed the memory capacity did not change. After sharing the details along with vm-support bundles, Engineering has identified the root cause.

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