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New storage devices added to Community NVMe Driver for ESXi Fling

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We have an exciting update for the VMware Community today with the release of the Community NVMe Driver for ESXi Fling v1.1. After the release of ESXi 6.7, a number of consumer NVMe devices were no longer bering detected which had previously worked with ESXi 6.5.

One workaround that many folks had to implement, including myself, was to replace the 6.7 NVMe driver. with the previous 6.5 version of the NVMe driver. Although this method still works with the latest ESXi 7.0 Update 2, it is less than ideal as you are using an extremely old version of the NVMe driver and you are giving up new NVMe device enablement, bug fixes and enhancements with the latest version of the driver.

Given the amount of comments and feedback that I had received in the previous blog post, I wanted to explore a way in which we can enable some of these consumer NVMe devices for the community. With the help from Yibo, we have updated the Community NVMe Driver for ESXi Fling to include support for the following storage devices:

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New Community Networking Driver for ESXi Fling

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I am super excited to announce the release of a new Community Networking Driver for ESXi Fling! The idea behind this project started about a year ago when we released an enhancement to the ne1000 driver as a community update which enabled ESXi to recognize the onboard network adapter for the Intel 10th Gen (Frost Canyon) NUC. Although the Intel NUC is not an officially supported VMware platform, it is extremely popular amongst the VMware Community. In working with the awesome Songtao, we were able to release this driver early last year for customers to take advantage of the latest Intel NUC release.

At the time, I knew that this would not be the last occurrence dealing with driver compatibility. We definitely wanted an easier way to distribute various community networking drivers that is packaged into a single deliverable for customers to easily consume and hence this project was born. In fact, it was quite timely as I had just received engineering samples of the new Intel NUC 11 Pro and Performance (Panther Canyon and Tiger Canyon) at the end of 2020 and work needed to be done before we could enable the onboard 2.5GbE (multi-gigabit) network adapter which is a default component of the new Intel Tiger Lake architecture. As reported back in early Jan, Songtao and colleague Shu were successful in getting ESXi to recognize the new 2.5GbE network adapter and has also been incorporated into this new Fling. In addition, we also started to receive reports from customers that after upgrading to a newer ESXi 7.0 releases, the onboard network adapters for the Intel 8th Gen NUC was no longer functioning. In an effort to help customers with this older platform, we have also updated the original community ne1000e driver to include the relevant PCI IDs within this Fling.


The new Community Networking Driver for ESXi is for PCIe-based network adapters and currently contains the following two driver modules:

  • igc-community - which adds support for Intel 11th Gen NUCs and any other hardware platform that uses the same 2.5GbE devices
  • e1000-community - which adds support for Intel 8th Gen NUC and any other hardware platform that uses same 1GbE devices

For a complete list of supported devices (VendorID/ProductID), please take a look at the Requirements tab on the Fling website. As with any Fling, this is being developed and supported in our spare time. In the future, we may consider adding other types of devices based on feedback from the broader community. I know Realtek-based PCIe NICs is something that many have been asking about and as mentioned back in this blog post, I have been in engaged with the Realtek team and hopefully in the near future, we may see an ESXi driver that can support some of the more popular devices in the community. If there are other PCIe-based networking adapters that could fit the Fling model, feel free to leave a comment on the Fling website and we can evaluate as time permits.

Supermicro VMware Homelab 2020 Options

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There are a number hardware options these days when it comes to building a new or upgrading your VMware Homelab. For instance, take a look at the 100+ VMware Community Homelab submissions which can range from $500 up to a whopping $50K. There are many factors that go into deciding what type of system to use and whether you use off the shelf hardware like an Intel NUC or a Supermicro kit or simply build your own.

From my experience, I have found that most folks prefer something that "just works" and for those needing more than 64GB memory, a Supermicro kit is generally preferred. For my personal homelab, I have an E200-8D and is by far it is one of the most popular Supermicro kits for running a VMware Homelab.

One question that I often receive is whether the E200-8D is still a recommended platform and whether there are other updated options? After answering several inquiries, I realize I probably should also do a quick blog post on this topic.

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