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ESXi with Intel Arc 750 / 770 GPU

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I recently had the opportunity to play with one of Intel's Arc 7 series discrete GPU (A750), which is part of the new Intel Arc desktop graphics product line, that was just released last Fall. While the primary audience for the Intel Arc graphics is for creators and desktop gaming, I was really interested in its applicability for a vSphere-based environment which also has a number of interesting use cases for graphics from Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI), video transcoding/rendering, AI/ML, Kubernetes, general purpose graphics acceleration and even basic gaming to name a few.

While there are many GPU options in the market for vSphere, depending on your needs and budget, the new Intel's new Arc 7 series could be a nice modern option as it is touted to be both price and performance competitive with other offerings within the market.

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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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Passthrough of Intel Iris Xe Integrated GPU on 11th Gen NUC results in Error Code 43

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I recently ran into an issue after enabling ESXi passthrough of the new Intel Iris Xe Integrated GPU (iGPU), which is available with the latest Intel 11th Gen Pro (Tiger Canyon) NUC and SimplyNUC Topaz. After installing the latest Intel Graphics Driver and rebooting the Microsoft Windows 10 (20H2) VM, I noticed Microsoft Device Manager would show the iGPU device with the following error message:

Windows has stopped this device because it has reported problems. (Code 43)


Unfortunately, this generic error message was not very useful in identifying the underlying issue. I was hoping the process was going to be seamless like it was for enabling passthrough of the iGPU in Intel NUC 10 (Frost Canyon) NUC, especially with the higher execution units for the 11the Gen NUC i3 (48 EU), i5 (80 EU) and i7 (96 EU).

I currently have a case open with the Intel NUC team and see if they can help investigate the underlying issue for their driver. For the time being, it looks like passthrough of the new iGPU is not fully functional when using ESXi 7.0 Update 2 and I will update this blog post if/when I have further updates to share.