WilliamLam.com

Search Results for: NUC

Decoding Intel NUC "Canyon" Generation with CPU "Lake" Generation Codenames

by // 9 Comments

Swift Canyon, Baby Canyon, Bean Canyon, Provo Canyon, Kaby Lake, Whiskey Lake, Coffee Lake ... these are just some of the Intel codenames that either refer to a NUC platform or CPU generation. I can understand the need for codenames, however for consumers, the various names are often confusing and being able to grok at which system is the "latest" is not always trivial. In some cases there are multiple updates to different generations of the platform all happening within a short period of time and most online sites may swap between codenames and the official "Nth" generation nomenclature.

I have been working with the Intel NUC platform from a VMware standpoint since the 6th Generation back in 2016 and even I still get confused at times on what is the latest "Canyon" NUCs and their respective "Lake" CPU generations. I can not imagine how complicated this might feel for some of our customers who are updating their VMware homelab every couple of years or someone who is just starting out for the first time. To not only help keep myself sane as I often get asked about Homelabs, literally on a weekly basis and to help educate others within out community, I have created a document which maps all Intel NUCs (full height) to their respective Nth generation along with the respective CPU architecture used in each platform.

[Read more...]

Intel NUC 9 Pro & Extreme - First "Modular" NUC

by // 27 Comments

The highly anticipated "modular" Next Unit of Computing (NUC) has just been announced at the Consumer Electronic Show (CES) this week, dubbed the Intel NUC 9 Pro (codename Quartz Canyon) and NUC 9 Extreme (codename Ghost Canyon). Boy am I super excited for this new platform and what it could mean for the VMware Community! 😍

Immediately off the bat, you can see that this is not your typical NUC "cube" form factor. Intel has completely redesigned the system from the inside and out, more on this in a bit. The key difference between the two NUC 9 variants (Pro and Extreme) are the CPU options, which are detailed below. For the remainder of this article, I will be focusing on the Pro version of the NUC 9 and I will call out any differences where applicable.

The use of the word "Pro" is also quite fitting as Intel is positioning this system as a high-end prosumer to Mid-Enterprise device compared to the traditional NUC. The NUC 9 Pro is targeting more demanding workloads such as Digital Content Creation, CAD/Manufacturing and Financial Service applications that either require a high-end graphics card or AI module for computing. When I first heard about this system from Intel, it conceptually reminded me of Apple's recent 2019 Mac Pro, which is also designed with modularity in mind and can cater to a variety of use cases.

Speaking of use cases, although Virtualization is not a target use case for this new platform, VMware customers have been taking advantage of the Intel NUCs for a number of years now and it is still by far the most popular platform for running a vSphere/vSAN/NSX Home Lab. However, one common complaint I often hear about the current generations of NUCs has been its CPU and I think the new NUC 9 Pro/Extreme will be a nice contender for current alternatives like the popular Supermicro E200-8D. Thanks to Intel, I was able to get my hands on a pre-production NUC 9 Pro unit for testing, so lets take a closer look at what this new platform has to offer!

[Read more...]

ESXi on Intel NUC 10 (Frost Canyon)

by // 65 Comments

Just a heads up, if you are considering the latest 10th Generation of the Intel NUC (formally known as Frost Canyon) which are now available on Amazon, Newegg & SimplyNUC, there is an issue to be aware of. The onboard Intel NIC is not detected by ESXi which prevents the installer from proceeding. This issue was reported by a fellow reader named Ben who reached out to me over the holiday and with his help, I was able to get access to the system. It looks like the these NUCs have a newer version of I219-V NIC which is currently not recognized by either the vmklinux e1000 or ne1000 driver.

UPDATE (09/21/20) - The required ne1000 driver has been incorporated into ESXi 7.0 Update 1

UPDATE (08/21/20) - To disable the TPM 2.0 connection cannot be established message in ESXi, please see this blog post for more details.

UPDATE (01/20/20) - As shared on Twitter last Friday, we now have an updated ne1000 driver that will detect the Intel NIC found in the new 10th Gen NUC. You will need to replace the existing ne1000 driver with the new offline bundle, which can be downloaded from here. I would like to remind folks that the Intel NUC is not an officially supported platform from VMware and although have have enable this new system for the community, it does not mean this system or previous generations are supported.

There are two options to author a new ESXi Image Profile containing the ne1000 driver, the easiest method is if you have an existing vCenter Server and using the vSphere H5 Client and Image Builder UI. For more details, please take a look at this blog post for detailed instructions.