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Updated findings for passthrough of Intel NUC Integrated Graphics (iGPU) with ESXi

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While searching for drivers for another Intel NUC platform, I saw that Intel had recently published new graphic drivers for Linux including support for their new Intel Arc GPUs. This of course got me curious on wondering whether this would help at all with the issues regarding passthrough of the integrated graphics (iGPU) for recent Intel NUCs? 🤔

As a refresher, starting with the 11th Gen Intel NUCs, passthrough of the iGPU on Windows had stopped working and would result in the infamous Windows Error Code 43 and even worse on the 12th Gen Intel NUCs, Windows would simply BSOD after the initial reboot. The behavior is also simliar for Linux operating systems, while it better handles the issue by not crashing the OS, iGPU passthrough is also not functional for Linux systems.

To be honest, I had low expectations these new Linux graphic drivers would behave any differently, but I decided for the sake of persistency that I would give it one more go. I had access to both an Intel NUC 12 Extreme (Dragon Canyon) and Intel NUC 12 Pro (Wall Street Canyon), both of which included recent Intel iGPUs.

🤯🤯🤯 is the only way I could describe what I had discovered after my testing!

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Quick Tip - Changes to building custom ESXi images in vSphere 8

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Historically, when a new version of ESXi is released, customers will use vSphere Image Builder either through the vSphere Image Builder UI or PowerCLI Image Builder cmdlets to create a custom ESXi image to include additional drivers such as the USB Network Native Driver for ESXi Fling.

Note: The current version of the USB Network Native Driver for ESXi Fling is not compatible with ESXi 8.0 and a new version of the driver will be needed. There is currently no ETA on when a new version will be available.

Typically, customers will use their existing vCenter Server deployment, which is usually running an older version to create their new custom ESXi image. This means you are importing a newer ESXi release into your vCenter Server or in the case of the PowerCLI Image Builder cmdlets, you are using an older release of PowerCLI. While this may have worked with previous releases, the assumption that vSphere Image Builder is "forward" compatible with future releases of ESXi is actually an incorrect assumption that many have made, including myself.

I bring this up because in vSphere 8, there have been changes in ESXi where this incompatibility will be observed when attempting to create a custom ESXi 8.0 image using a non-compatible vCenter Server or a PowerCLI release.

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Using vSphere Lifecycle Manager (vLCM) to remediate Nested ESXi host with CPU on the host is not supported 

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If you are running a Nested ESXi VM on top of a physical ESXi host that does not have a supported CPU and you are using vSphere Lifecycle Manager (vLCM), the pre-check and/or remediation will fail due to the following error:

The CPU on the host is not supported by this image


The solution is actually quite simple and is similiar to what you had to do for your physical ESXi host by adding the ESXi kernel boot option allowLegacyCPU=true to successfully boot and install ESXi as recently explained in this blog post. To emulate this setup, I am using my trusty 2011 Apple Mac Mini which is running ESXi 8.0 with the kernel boot option and it is then running a Nested ESXi 7.0 Update 3g VM.

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