Search Results for: intel NUC

ESXi on Minisforum MS-01

02.22.2024 by William Lam // 43 Comments

In recent years, there have been a number of new players that have entered the mini PC market that have really been pushing the boundaries on small form factor systems. Minisforum is one such company, that was founded in 2018 and have been steadily producing more interesting kits to compete with some of the more established vendors in this space.

Early on, the kits from Minisforum were pretty comparable (compute, network and storage capabilities) with other vendors using the popular 4x4 design, pioneered by Intel with their Intel NUC platform. With each new generation of mini PCs from Minisforum, the chassis aesthetics started to become more unique and they started to have more differentiated offerings like broader CPU choices including some of the latest AMD desktop and mobile processors.

Even I was intrigued by some of Minisforum offers from a VMware perspective, but unfortunately Minisforum had no interest in collaborating when I had reached out a while back. Over the years, I stayed informed of new releases from Minisforum but nothing really stood out to me as much as their recent announcement of the Minisforums Workstation MS-01.

UPDATE (03/05/2024) - SimplyNUC has just launched the Onyx Pro, which is simply a rebrand of the Minisforums MS-01 and the review here also applies to the SimplyNUC Onyx Pro.

[Read more...]

ESXi on iKOOLCORE R2

12.13.2023 by William Lam // 3 Comments

I first wrote about the tiny palm size iKOOLCORE R1 back in Spring of this year, I was pretty impressed at how capable the R1 was, especially given the tiny footprint that is slightly taller than a Lego minifigure!

It has not even been a full year since the release of the R1 and the second generation of the R-Series is now available, not surprisingly dubbed the R2.

[Read more...]

VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) using USB Network Adaptor

12.11.2023 by William Lam // 5 Comments

To deploy VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF), your physical or virtual ESXi host must have at least two network adaptors to be able to migrate to Distributed Virtual Switch (VDS), which is configured as part of the VCF Bringup process. While you can technically migrate to a VDS with just a single network adaptor using this trick, it is definitely easier if you have a system that meets this basic requirement.

Earlier this year, I demonstrated that you can deploy VCF using just an Intel NUC with only 64GB of memory, which would be the minimum to run single node VCF Management Domain, however it does not leave you with much room for running other workloads due to pushing the memory limits.

The ASUS PN64-E1 is currently one of my top favorite small form factor kits, especially being able to support up 96GB of memory using the new non-binary DDR5 memory modules. After the release of VCF 5.1, I wanted to use the ASUS PN64-E1 for a VCF deployment, but there was only one problem ... my particular configuration of the PN64-E1 only had a single network adaptor!

I thought I could out smart the VCF Bringup pre-check by using a USB network adaptor and installing the popular USB Network Native Driver for ESXi 😉

However, it turns out the pre-check is looking for PCIe-based network adaptors, so while the system does have two network adaptors, it still failed the pre-check and prevented the deployment from continuing. I ended up reaching out some of the VCF Engineers to see if there were any workarounds and he was kind enough to provide me with a nice workaround that would benefit our users looking to play and explore VCF in a lab environment.

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

[Read more...]