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ESXi on SimplyNUC Moonstone

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SimplyNUC has been a long time partner/reseller of the popular Intel NUC platform for quite some time but over the past few years, they have expanded their portfolio to include additional 4x4 systems that are completely designed in-house by SimplyNUC include Topaz, Ruby, Cypress and Chapel Rock to just name a few.


Moonstone is the latest 4x4 addition from SimplyNUC, which is an AMD-based kit that includes support for the latest AMD Zen 4 (Phoenix) and Zen 3+ (Rembrandt R) processors. The VMware Community has always been interested in an AMD-based kit but typically they do not work well due to the presence of a Realtek-based network adaptor, where drivers from Realtek does not exists for ESXi.

The first thing that caught my attention when I first heard about Moonstone was that this was an AMD kit that features an Intel-based network adapter as its primary network interface! ?

This definitely took me by surprise, not sure if AMD was making any statements about their networking choices or simply diversifying their networking options? ? Either way, I was not complaining and I thought this might be the first real viable AMD 4x4 candidate, from a VMware perspective, in quite some time.


Thanks to the SimplyNUC team, I did not have to wonder much more and I got the opportunity to put the Moonstone through its paces and see what it can do for the VMware Community!

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VMware Cloud Foundation 5.0 running on Intel NUC

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Interested in trying out the latest release of VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) 5.0? Don't have some beefy hardware to meet all the requirements, not to worry! Did you know you can actually deploy a VCF Management Domain using just a single Intel NUC or simliar small form factor system? This is exactly how I kicked the tires with the latest VCF 5.0 release ?


Disclaimer: This is not officially supported by VMware, please use at your own risk.

Requirements:

  • VMware Cloud Builder 5.0 OVA (Build 21822418)
  • VCF 5.0 Licenses
  • Intel NUC configured with
    • 64GB of memory or more
    • Dual onboard networking ("Tall" NUC like Intel NUC 11 Pro, which is what I used) OR add additional NICs with these Thunderbolt 3 Networking options (no USB NIC)
    • 2 x SSD that are empty for use for vSAN bootstrap (500GB+ for capacity)
  • ESXi 8.0 Update 1a installed on the Intel NUC using USB device
  • Ability to deploy and run the VMware Cloud Builder (CB) Appliance in a separate environment (ESXi/Fusion/Workstation)

Note: While my experiment used an Intel NUC, any system that meets the basic requirements above should also work.

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Frigate NVR with Coral TPU & iGPU passthrough using ESXi on Intel NUC

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For the past couple of weeks, I have been investigating some issues reported by the community when using ESXi with the popular Google Coral Edge TPU for accelerating machine learning (ML) inferencing. Fortunately, with the help from one of our engineers, Songtao, we were able to find a solution! You can find the complete write-up HERE and it also works with the latest ESXi 8.0 Update 1 release.

I was actually surprised at how popular the combination of the Google TPU and ESXi was from the community, which I guess should not come as a surprise, especially with the capabilities of ESXi coupled with all the interests in AI/ML these days.


Another popular use case of the Google TPU, which I had recently learned about is for real-time AI object detection using the Frigate NVR (Network Video Recorder) software, which is a commonly deployed solution that enable various home security and automation capabilities.

In fact, during a conversation with my buddy Alan Renouf, who is a Product Manager focused on running modern Edge workloads and is also a Frigate user, I discovered that the Frigate stack, which encompasses inferencing, video decoding, and the integration of cameras and sensors, closely resembles the components that you would find in many Edge deployments with simliar set of use cases.

Funny enough, I ended up leveraging a lot of my existing work with running ESXi on Intel NUCs and iGPU passthrough, while learning about and setting up Frigate! This was definitely an interesting project to explore and as shared, I now have a complete working setup with the full setup and write-up below.

JFYI - I have already submitted a PR 6576 to update the Frigate ESXi documentation as it is severely out of date and help folks quickly find the latest setup instructions.

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