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VMware customer production use cases for Intel NUC 

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The Intel NUC also known as the Next Unit of Computing is a very popular platform for running VMware based homelabs. I have been working with the Intel NUCs since 2016 with their 6th Generation model when I decided to rebuild my personal home lab. Since then I have continued my efforts to ensure that vSphere continues to run extremely well on this amazing little platform even if it is not officially supported by VMware, which now also includes the latest 11th Generation (Tiger and Panther Canyon NUCs).

At the end of last year, I came across this fascinating Intel NUC documentary that was put together by Robtech, which I highly recommend a watch.

While listening to some of the use cases that SimplyNUC had observed over the years which has spanned land ⛰️, air 🛫, sea 🛳️ and space 🚀, it got me thinking about some of the use cases that I had come across while talking to our VMware customers.

Disclaimer: The Intel NUC is not officially supported by VMware and therefore they are not listed on the VMware HCL

A common misconception is that Intel NUCs are only useful for homelab purposes and has no place for running production workloads, which is just simply not true. Here are some of the common use cases that I have seen over the years, most of which are deployed at the Edge/ROBO:

  • vSphere Development/Testing, Education and Training
  • Retail, Grocery, Industrial Factories and Ships
  • Build Automation (CI/CD)
  • Telco/NFV (e.g. Network/Hardware monitoring)
  • Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI)

I also wanted to take this opportunity and to share some of the stories on how some of our customers have taken advantage of this platform, even though it is not officially supported by VMware and some of the underlying business drivers. Hopefully these stories will educate, resonate and perhaps even inspire other customers to explore different computing platforms, especially at the Edge where constraints and requirements will differ quite significantly when compared to a typical Enterprise Datacenter.

If you would like to share your story of how you are using Intel NUC and VMware for production, feel free to reach out using the contact page.

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Quick Tip - How to use Apple Thunderbolt 2 ethernet adapter with ESXi 7.0 or greater

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I was doing some testing on my Apple 2018 Mac Mini with the latest ESXi 7.0 Update 1 release and I needed to setup a separate network connection as the onboard 10GbE was not working for me initially. I was out of ideas but I did remember that I still have my Apple Thunderbolt 2 to gigabit ethernet adapter which was something I had used quite a bit in the early days when I was using the Apple Mac Mini as my homelab system.

Like all recent Apple Mac's, the 2018 Mac Mini only supports Thunderbolt 3 (USB-C) ports and obviously not compatibility with the network adapter. Luckily, I did have an official Apple Thunderbolt 3 to Thunderbolt 2 adapter lying around which would allow me to connect the network adapter to the Mac Mini and to my surprise, it was automatically detected by the latest release of ESXi!


This partially came in a surprise because the Apple network adapter uses the Broadcom tg3 driver and I was not 100% sure if the native Broadcom (ntg3) would automatically claim this device since it was never officially supported.


Its definitely good to know this ethernet adapter still works as long as you have a TB2 to TB3 converter adapter and this should also work for any Intel NUC that have Thunderbolt 3 ports.

Stateless ESXi-Arm with Raspberry Pi

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I am super excited to be able to finally share, what I think, is a really cool ESXi-Arm solution which has been an evolution of this and this. This solution also incorporates a number of automation techniques I have shared over the years when it comes to ESXi scripted installation aka Kickstart, so it was really neat to all those things get pulled into a single solution. Lastly, I also want to give huge thanks to Cyprien Laplace who threw the initial challenge my way after I had shared how to perform an ESXi-Arm scripted installation without using SD Card.

ESXi-x86 can be deployed using either a stateful or stateless installation. In the latter case, ESXi is booted over the network using the vSphere Auto Deploy feature in vCenter Server which does not require any local media for ESXi. Upon attaching itself to vCenter Server, Auto Deploy then leverages vSphere Host Profiles and its rules engine to determine which configurations or profiles should be applied to ensure the ESXi hosts are configured per their desired stated. Here is a quick video overview of how Auto Deploy and Host Profiles work.

Fundamentally, vSphere Auto Deploy and Host Profiles can also work with ESXi-Arm but today, vCenter Server would require some code modification for this to actually work.

OK, so am I teasing you with something that does not exists? Nope, but I just wanted to help set the context 🙂

The solution that I have created boots ESXi-Arm over the network in a "stateless" manner, so there is no need for an SD Card or USB device plugged into the Raspberry Pi (rPI). In addition to the ESXi-Arm files, it also includes a custom payload which runs to retrieve additional configurations which can automatically join a desired vCenter Server as well as apply further customizations of an ESXi-Arm host. As you can see, this solution behaves similar to that of vSphere Auto Deploy and Host Profiles but does not use either of these vSphere features and works with the ESXi-Arm Fling right now.

Technically speaking, these techniques can also be applied to ESXi-x86 but I will leave that to the reader for further exploration.

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