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Quick Tip - Monitoring ESXi remote syslog forwarding

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When an ESXi host is unable to forward its logs to a remote syslog server, a VMkernel Observation (VOB) is automatically raised by the host and it can be used to proactively alert administrators, which has been possible since ESXi 5.0 .... per this blog post from 2012 after some Googling! 😅😂

While I was pretty confident the behavior described above still holds true for our latest ESXi 7.x and 8.x releases, I wanted to be sure before responding back to a colleague. I deployed the latest ESXi 7.0 Update 3q and ESXi 8.0 Update 3b and after configuring syslog forwarding, I disabled the NIC on my Aria Operations for Logs to simulate a network disconnect and I saw the following log entry in /var/log/vobd.log

2024-09-28T21:12:00.298Z: [UserLevelCorrelator] 7452916537us: [esx.problem.vmsyslogd.remote.failure] The host "192.168.30.62:514" has become unreachable. Remote logging to this host has stopped.

By default, ESXi will attempt to retry the remote syslog connection after the configured timeout (default 180 seconds), which is a relatively new configuration option that is available with ESXCLI (esxcli system syslog config set --default-timeout XX).

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ESXi on ASUS NUC 14 Pro (Revel Canyon)

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The ASUS NUC 14 Pro (formally known as Revel Canyon) is the first ASUS-based NUC since the acquisition of the NUC Division from Intel last fall. I know many of my readers have been requesting a review of the new ASUS NUCs, but to be honest, it has been pretty difficult to get samples directly from ASUS, which was not the case when I had worked with Intel.

In fact, it was thanks to the folks over at SimplyNUC who was kind enough to provide access to the ASUS NUC 14 Pro, so that I could do a proper review 🙏

In case you are reading this ASUS, I hope this was simply due to the initial integration of the NUC Division and in the future, getting early samples will be possible to help support our shared community of users.


At first glance, the exterior chassis of the ASUS NUC 14 Pro has minimal changes, it is the same classic 4x4 design that we have all come to love. The only noticeable change is the raised bevel on the top of the chassis and the removal of the etched Intel NUC brand which was located on top.

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Intel Neural Processing Unit (NPU) with ESXi

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Starting with Intel Meteor Lake (14th Generation) CPUs, now part of the new Intel Core Ultra Processor (Series 1) brand, an integrated Neural Processing Unit or NPU is built right into the SoC (system-on-chip) and is optimized for low power AI Inferencing.


I found this article from Chips and Cheese about the new Intel Meteor Lake NPU to be super insightful, definitely recommend a read if you are new to NPUs.

While you can already consume the Intel integrated graphics (iGPU) in platforms like the Intel NUC with ESXi for workload inferencing, I was curious on whether this new Intel NPU could actually be used by ESXi? 🤔

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