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vSphere 8 productizes Community Networking Driver Fling for ESXi

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Back in July with the release of vSphere 7.0 Update 3f, I had shared that all Intel i219 devices from the Community Networking Driver Fling for ESXi is now part of default ESXi 7.0 Update 3f installation. This simplified the ESXi installation process as customers no longer needed to create a custom ESXi ISO that contains the Fling driver.

While the e1000-community module within the Community Networking Driver Fling for ESXi has been productized, the Fling also includes another driver module called igc-community which adds support for Intel i220, i225 & i226 PCIe-based network devices. For recent Intel NUC platforms like the Intel NUC 11 (Panther Canyon & Tiger Canyon), Intel NUC 11 Extreme (Beast Canyon), Intel NUC 12 Extreme (Dragon Canyon) and Intel NUC 12 Pro (Wall Street Canyon) the Fling is still required for ESXi to recognize the onboard network interfaces.

As of vSphere 8, which was recently announced at VMware Explore US, I am happy 😆 (or jacked, jazzed, or pumped) to share that the Community Networking Driver Fling for ESXi will be fully productized! Customers who install ESXi 8.0 will no longer need to create a custom ESXi Image and the network devices listed on the Fling page will automatically be detected by ESXi.

DFI GHF51 - Worlds smallest AMD Ryzen SBC

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Awhile back I came to learn about an interesting AMD single board computer (SBC) from a company called DFI, which specializes in building embedded solutions and industrial motherboards. There are a number of vendors in this space, including OnLogic, Rugged Computers, ASRock Industrial to name a few and Bivrost which I had recently came to learn about. The Industrial vertical is actually a really interesting segment of the market that includes manufacturing, oil, gas and utilities and is often associated with the Internet of Things (IoT), also referred to as the Industrial IoT (IIoT) market.

The demands and requirements of the Industrial IoT market is wildly different from your typical Enterprise datacenter, especially when you think about some of the harsh environments that hardware must run whether that is a manufacturing facility to a remote oil rig. It is not uncommon that the hardware used must be able to withstand extreme temperature changes with greater levels of reliability but also longer duration of support and product availability for up to 10 years!


With all that said, I was pretty intrigued with their latest offering called the GHF51, which comes in at an ultra tiny 1.8" inches and is dubbed the worlds smallest board with an AMD Ryzen CPU. You can see how tiny the SBC is compared to a lego mini-figure pictured above.

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Potentially interesting VMware Homelab Kits for 2022

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I am always on the lookout for new and interesting hardware platforms that can benefit the VMware Homelab Community. In the month of January, there were a number of new announcements that I had been following including news from the Computer Electronic Show (CES) but also a couple of product releases from vendors that I had not heard of before until most recently.

While the global silicon shortage is still a very real challenge, here are some of the new and upcoming hardware platforms that I think could potentially be interesting for VMware Homelabs in 2022. The list below is not exhaustive and I primarily focused on platforms that offers a unique or interesting capability based on the various requirements that I have heard from the community over the years. As an example, I know some of you have expressed interests in platforms that are capable of supporting full length discrete GPU for VDI, AL/ML and Kubernetes-based workloads to a platform that can enable more advanced networking features with multiple onboard network adapters.

If there are other platforms that I or the community should definitely keep an eye out for in 2022, feel free to leave a comment with a pointer to the reference. I will periodically update this article with additional new systems, so definitely bookmark this page and check back frequently.

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