Search Results for: Intel NUC

How to recover ESXi installed on USB device after disabling vmkusb module?

01.12.2023 by William Lam // Leave a Comment

I have to say, this is one of the more interesting challenges that I have come across in quite some time. A user was looking for assistance after they accidentally disabled the vmkusb module, which is the USB driver for ESXi and allows it to communicate with USB devices that are connected to the system.

The vmkusb module also plays a very critical role if you have ESXi installed on a USB device, as the driver is required for proper functionality such as being able to save the ESXi state and configurations to the USB device. So what happens when you disable the vmkusb module and you reboot the ESXi host, which is also installed on a USB device?

Well, everything continues to work including VMs since ESXi by design runs in memory after the initial boot from the USB device. However, any configuration changes made after that is lost after a system reboot including the attempt to re-enable the vmkusb module since ESXi is unable save any of the settings to the USB device. Fortunately, I was able to help the user out as I had a few ideas on how we could fully recover from this type of scenario and hence the blog post.

Hopefully a lesson can be learned here, do not make changes or disable things that you are not familiar with 🙂

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High-end Dell Precision 7770 & 7670 laptops with 128GB memory for ESXi

12.06.2022 by William Lam // 4 Comments

I have been following the progress on the new Compression Attached Memory Module (CAMM), which was announced earlier this year and is a new laptop memory standard that has been created by Dell. Dell intends to replace the aging SODIMM memory module, which are typically found in laptops and small form factor systems like the popular Intel NUC.

This StorageReview article by Charles Jefferies provides a nice summary of the new CAMM technology and the benefits over the 25 year old SODIMM modules. While the CAMM technology is currently proprietary, Dell has been working with Intel on this standard and have also submitted their design to the Joint Electron Device Engineering Council (JEDEC) for CAMM to become a new industry standard for laptop memory.

My biggest interests with CAMM is the capacity of their modules which can reach up to 128GB for a single CAMM module! For SODIMM, we have been limited to 32GB for a single module for a number of years and this will not be changing any time soon. Just imagine the popular 4x4 Intel NUC with 128GB memory! ?

Given CAMM was just announced earlier this year, I was not expecting to see any systems that a consumer could purchase for quite some time. I was actually pleasantly surprise to learn recently, that two new high-end Dell workstation laptops can now be purchased with CAMM memory and also configured with up to 128GB of memory. ?

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Quick Tip - TPM 2.0 connection cannot be established after upgrading to ESXi 8.0

10.18.2022 by William Lam // 12 Comments

There has been several reports from folks internally and within the community that after upgrading to ESXi 8.0, they are now seeing the following TPM error message:

TPM 2.0 device detected but a connection cannot be established.

The common theme between all these reported cases that I have seen is that they are all using an Intel NUC. While the Intel NUCs may list TPM support, they do not support either TPM Interface Specification (TIS) for TPM 1.2 or the First In, First Out (FIFO) for TPM 2.0, which are industry standards for communicating with a TPM device that ESXi uses.

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