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Enhancements to the community ne1000 VIB for Intel NUC 10

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As many of you know, the onboard Intel NIC (8086:0d4f) found in the 10th generation of the Intel NUC (Frost Canyon) is not automatically recognized by ESXi and requires an updated ne1000 VIB which was released earlier this year. An unfortunate side affect after patching or upgrading an ESXi host which contains this modified ne1000 VIB is that it will be replaced by a newer version of the VIB and causes the NIC to no longer be recognized again.

A quick workaround is to simply re-install the modified ne1000 VIB and network connectivity will be restored which is less than ideal. A new vSphere Image Profile can also be created that contains both the patch/upgrade you intend to apply along with the modified ne1000 VIB, ensuring that you remove the newer version which may not be ideal as well. In speaking with Songtao, a VMware Engineer who I worked with on the USB Network Native Driver for ESXi, about this issue and he came up with a very simple solution. Lets choose a different name for the VIB module which removes all the complexity mentioned above. This solution would allow for both drivers to coexists and more importantly, it is persistent across patching and upgrades of ESXi.

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How to patch Intel NUC 10 with latest ESXi 7.0 update?

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vSphere 7.0b was just released last week and one of the important fixes was to resolve an issue where Nested ESXi VMs were crashing upon powering on an inner-guest VM. This looks to have also affect newer generations of CPUs including Intel's 10th Gen Comet Lake which is also found in the latest 10th Gen Intel NUCs (Frost Canyon).

A number of folks quickly found that if you simply applied the ESXi 7.0b patch, an unexpected behavior occurred on the 10th Gen Intel NUCs and the onboard networking was lost upon a reboot. This occurs as the original ne1000 driver which had been replaced with a newer version found within ESXi 7.0b no longer recognizes the onboard Intel NIC. The solution is quite simple, create a new Image Profile that contains the Intel NUC NIC Driver.

Several of you have asked for instructions and although this is a pretty common vSphere workflow, I have documented the two supported options using the vSphere Image Builder utility but there are definitely other methods which will have the same results. If you have access to a vCenter Server 6.7 or newer, I recommend using the Image Builder UI. If vCenter Server access is not available, then you can use Image Builder with PowerCLI, however you will need to have access to a Windows machine as the Image Builder cmdlet is not supported with PowerCLI Core.

Note: There is currently a known bug with the Image Builder UI when using vSphere 7 which will prevent you from authoring a new Image Profile. A workaround would be to deploy a VCSA 6.7 which does not have this issue when looking to use the Image Builder UI.

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Passthrough of Integrated GPU (iGPU) for standard Intel NUC

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Earlier this week I found out that it was possible to passthrough the Integrated GPU (iGPU) for standard Intel NUC which was motivated by a question I had saw on the VMware Subreddit. I have written about iGPU passthrough for Intel NUCs before but only for the higher end models which were the Hades Canyon NUC at the time.

To be honest, I never thought about trying this out with a standard NUC as I figured the iGPU may not be powerful enough or warrant any interests. After sharing the news on Twitter, I came to learn from the community that not only is this desirable for various use cases but some folks have also been doing this for some time now and have shared some the benefits it brings for certain types of workloads.

Below are the instructions I used to enable iGPU passthrough on an Intel NUC 10 (Frost Canyon) with vSphere 7.0. These instructions should also be applicable for other NUC models and earlier versions of vSphere including details around passthrough configuration persistency which I know some folks have ran into which I was able to figure out as part of this experiment.

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