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Passthrough of Integrated GPU (iGPU) for standard Intel NUC

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Earlier this week I found out that it was possible to passthrough the Integrated GPU (iGPU) for standard Intel NUC which was motivated by a question I had saw on the VMware Subreddit. I have written about iGPU passthrough for Intel NUCs before but only for the higher end models which were the Hades Canyon NUC at the time.

To be honest, I never thought about trying this out with a standard NUC as I figured the iGPU may not be powerful enough or warrant any interests. After sharing the news on Twitter, I came to learn from the community that not only is this desirable for various use cases but some folks have also been doing this for some time now and have shared some the benefits it brings for certain types of workloads.

Below are the instructions I used to enable iGPU passthrough on an Intel NUC 10 (Frost Canyon) with vSphere 7.0. These instructions should also be applicable for other NUC models and earlier versions of vSphere including details around passthrough configuration persistency which I know some folks have ran into which I was able to figure out as part of this experiment.

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Homelab considerations for vSphere 7

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With the vSphere 7 Launch Event just a few days away, I know many of you are eager to get your hands on this latest release of vSphere and start playing with it in you homelab. A number of folks in the VMware community have already started covering some of the amazing capabilities that will be introduced in vSphere and vSAN 7 and I expect to see that ramp up even more in the coming weeks.

One area that I have not seen much coverage on is around homelab usage with vSphere 7. Given this is a pretty significant release, I think there are some things you should be aware of before you rush out and immediately upgrade your existing homelab environment. As with any vSphere release, you should always carefully review the release notes when they are made available and verify the hardware and its underlying components are officially on the VMware HCL, this is the only way to ensure that you will have a good and working experience.

Having said that, here are just a few of the observations that I have made while running pre-GA builds of vSphere 7 in my own personal homelab. This is not an exhaustive list and I will try to update this article as more information is made available.

Disclaimer: The following considerations below is based on my own personal homelab experience using a pre-GA build of vSphere 7 and it does not reflect any official support or guidance from VMware. Please use these recommendation at your own risk.

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Decoding Intel NUC "Canyon" Generation with CPU "Lake" Generation Codenames

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Swift Canyon, Baby Canyon, Bean Canyon, Provo Canyon, Kaby Lake, Whiskey Lake, Coffee Lake ... these are just some of the Intel codenames that either refer to a NUC platform or CPU generation. I can understand the need for codenames, however for consumers, the various names are often confusing and being able to grok at which system is the "latest" is not always trivial. In some cases there are multiple updates to different generations of the platform all happening within a short period of time and most online sites may swap between codenames and the official "Nth" generation nomenclature.

I have been working with the Intel NUC platform from a VMware standpoint since the 6th Generation back in 2016 and even I still get confused at times on what is the latest "Canyon" NUCs and their respective "Lake" CPU generations. I can not imagine how complicated this might feel for some of our customers who are updating their VMware homelab every couple of years or someone who is just starting out for the first time. To not only help keep myself sane as I often get asked about Homelabs, literally on a weekly basis and to help educate others within out community, I have created a document which maps all Intel NUCs (full height) to their respective Nth generation along with the respective CPU architecture used in each platform.

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