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Disabling TPM 2.0 connection cannot be established message in ESXi for Intel NUC 10

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For Intel NUC 10 (Frost Canyon) owners who have installed ESXi may have noticed that even after disabling Intel's Trusted Platform Module (TPM), the following warning message "TPM 2.0 device detected but a connection cannot be established." is still being displayed in the vSphere UI as shown in the screenshot below. 


Thanks to Reddit member mscaff and casperette who recently discovered and confirmed that the latest BIOS (FN0044) resolves an issue where disabling TPM in the BIOS was not actually working which would explain the behavior observed above. The really interesting thing is that I had initially ran into this problem several months back and after speaking with some internal VMware folks, I was able to get rid of this message without this update. This involved installing Windows 10 and clear the TPM keys which may have still been cache but since then, it has not been reproducible by other folks. In any case, it is always recommended to check and update to latest BIOS to ensure you have all the latest bug fixes.

Lastly, Intel states support for TPM 2.0 for these NUCs, so why is ESXi complaining? Well, it has to do with the interface type and not with SHA1 vs SHA256 which are both supported on the NUC 10. The NUC only supports CRB but proper compliant TPM 2.0 chip must support FIFO which is not configurable the last time I had checked. For more detail requirements and configuration of TPM 2.0 on ESXi, please refer to this blog post.

ESXi on Intel NUC 10 (Frost Canyon)

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Just a heads up, if you are considering the latest 10th Generation of the Intel NUC (formally known as Frost Canyon) which are now available on Amazon, Newegg & SimplyNUC, there is an issue to be aware of. The onboard Intel NIC is not detected by ESXi which prevents the installer from proceeding. This issue was reported by a fellow reader named Ben who reached out to me over the holiday and with his help, I was able to get access to the system. It looks like the these NUCs have a newer version of I219-V NIC which is currently not recognized by either the vmklinux e1000 or ne1000 driver.

UPDATE (09/21/20) - The required ne1000 driver has been incorporated into ESXi 7.0 Update 1

UPDATE (08/21/20) - To disable the TPM 2.0 connection cannot be established message in ESXi, please see this blog post for more details.

UPDATE (01/20/20) - As shared on Twitter last Friday, we now have an updated ne1000 driver that will detect the Intel NIC found in the new 10th Gen NUC. You will need to replace the existing ne1000 driver with the new offline bundle, which can be downloaded from here. I would like to remind folks that the Intel NUC is not an officially supported platform from VMware and although have have enable this new system for the community, it does not mean this system or previous generations are supported.

There are two options to author a new ESXi Image Profile containing the ne1000 driver, the easiest method is if you have an existing vCenter Server and using the vSphere H5 Client and Image Builder UI. For more details, please take a look at this blog post for detailed instructions.