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MacOS 11 (Big Sur) Beta 1 on ESXi

06.24.2020 by William Lam // 15 Comments

The first Beta of Apple MacOS 11 (Big Sur) was just released a couple of days ago and I know folks are excited to start kicking the tires. Some folks have noticed when to installing Big Sur running on VMware Fusion, the following error is observed:

BIErrorDomain error 3


From the suggested workarounds, it looks like the MacOS installer was somehow unable to detect that the underlying hardware was Apple which causes this generic error to be thrown. Interestingly, this was the same error I came across when attempting to install Big Sur on ESXi 7.0. Instead of having to lookup your physical Apple hardware IDs and specify several VM Advanced Settings, you can simply add the following setting which will accomplish the same behavior:

smbios.reflectHost = "TRUE"

After the setting has been applied, the error should go away and you should be able to upgrade from an existing MacOS deployment to Big Sur. This issue has already been reported internally at VMware and I have also shared with the teams the quick workaround.

Here is Big Sur on ESXi 7.0 running on an Apple Mac Mini 2018 (requires ESXi 7.0b patch VMware-ESXi-7.0b-16324942)


Here is Big Sur on ESXi 6.7 Update 3 running on an Apple Mac Mini 2018 (requires ESXi 6.7 Patch 02 ESXi670-202004002)

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Categories // Apple, ESXi, vSphere 7.0 Tags // Big Sur, esxi 6.7, ESXi 7.0, macOS

Passthrough of Integrated GPU (iGPU) for standard Intel NUC

06.18.2020 by William Lam // 30 Comments

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.

Neat! Just found out you can actually passthrough the iGPU of standard Intel NUC. The trick looks to be enabling passthrough using ESXi Embedded Host Client UI & then you can assign it using vSphere UI#Homelab pic.twitter.com/NwuxbXwUMj

— William Lam (@lamw) June 15, 2020

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.

Can’t take credit. It was one of our collegaues that pointet me to it. Hw transcoding went up a factor of almost x 20. So for specefic workloads the nuc is suddently a lot more capable than before.

— Robert Jensen (@rhjensen) June 15, 2020

I’ve been doing this forever, when I need to crack passwords but don’t need the full 7 gpu rig - all Supermicro and 1080ti GPUs these dayshttps://t.co/GJGRV5eu8f

— Rob VandenBrink (@rvandenbrink) June 15, 2020

seems like this would be great for ESXi + Plex hardware transcoding

— Will Beers (@willbeers) June 15, 2020

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.

[Read more...]

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Categories // ESXi Tags // ESXi 7.0, GPU, Intel NUC, Passthrough

Quick Tip - HTTPs now supported with wget on ESXi 7.0

06.18.2020 by William Lam // 4 Comments

This morning I needed to install the USB Network Native Driver Fling for ESXi and realized that offline bundles can not be installer over a remote URL. I figure I would download it directly to my ESXi host using wget. As soon as I hit the enter key to send the command I quickly remember that this will fail as the version of wget in the ESXi Shell does not support HTTPs. To my surprise, it actually worked! 😍

[[email protected]:~] wget https://download3.vmware.com/software/vmw-tools/USBNND/ESXi700-VMKUSB-NIC-FLING-34491022-component-15873236.zip
Connecting to download3.vmware.com (184.29.106.37:443)
ESXi700-VMKUSB-NIC-F 100% |**************************************************************************************************************************************************************************| 341k 0:00:00 ETA

This looks to be an enhancement in ESXI 7.0 and you no longer will get the "bad address" error when specifying an HTTPs URL as shown in the example below when running against the latest ESXi 6.7 Update 3 release.

[[email protected]:~] wget https://download3.vmware.com/software/vmw-tools/USBNND/ESXi700-VMKUSB-NIC-FLING-34491022-component-15873236.zip
wget: bad address 'download3.vmware.com'

Thank you to the Engineer who fixed this, this was a very pleasant and welcome surprise that I know will also be helpful to folks who automate using ESXi Scripted Installations.

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Categories // Automation, ESXi, vSphere 7.0 Tags // ESXi 7.0, wget

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Author

William Lam is a Senior Staff Solution Architect working in the VMware Cloud team within the Cloud Infrastructure Business Group (CIBG) at VMware. He focuses on Cloud Native technologies, Automation, Integration and Operation for the VMware Cloud based Software Defined Datacenters (SDDC)

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Recent

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