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Intel NUC 9 Pro & Extreme - First "Modular" NUC

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The highly anticipated "modular" Next Unit of Computing (NUC) has just been announced at the Consumer Electronic Show (CES) this week, dubbed the Intel NUC 9 Pro (codename Quartz Canyon) and NUC 9 Extreme (codename Ghost Canyon). Boy am I super excited for this new platform and what it could mean for the VMware Community! 😍

Immediately off the bat, you can see that this is not your typical NUC "cube" form factor. Intel has completely redesigned the system from the inside and out, more on this in a bit. The key difference between the two NUC 9 variants (Pro and Extreme) are the CPU options, which are detailed below. For the remainder of this article, I will be focusing on the Pro version of the NUC 9 and I will call out any differences where applicable.

The use of the word "Pro" is also quite fitting as Intel is positioning this system as a high-end prosumer to Mid-Enterprise device compared to the traditional NUC. The NUC 9 Pro is targeting more demanding workloads such as Digital Content Creation, CAD/Manufacturing and Financial Service applications that either require a high-end graphics card or AI module for computing. When I first heard about this system from Intel, it conceptually reminded me of Apple's recent 2019 Mac Pro, which is also designed with modularity in mind and can cater to a variety of use cases.

Speaking of use cases, although Virtualization is not a target use case for this new platform, VMware customers have been taking advantage of the Intel NUCs for a number of years now and it is still by far the most popular platform for running a vSphere/vSAN/NSX Home Lab. However, one common complaint I often hear about the current generations of NUCs has been its CPU and I think the new NUC 9 Pro/Extreme will be a nice contender for current alternatives like the popular Supermicro E200-8D. Thanks to Intel, I was able to get my hands on a pre-production NUC 9 Pro unit for testing, so lets take a closer look at what this new platform has to offer!

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Will Intel’s VMCS Shadowing Feature Benefit VMware’s Nested Virtualization?

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For many years now, VMware customers have been using Nested Virtualization, which is the ability to run a hypervisor such as vSphere ESXi within a virtual machine. Even though Nested Virtualization is not officially supported by VMware, customers have come to rely upon this technology for their lab environments and sometimes even production environments. VMware also heavily relies on this technology for their own internal development as well as their Hands On Lab for VMworld, which is now offered as an online SaaS (Software-as-a-Service) solution called Hands On lab Online.

Performance of Nested Virtualization has come a long way since its first introduction and it continues to get better with advancements made in hardware from both Intel and AMD. A couple of months back, I came across an article discussing a new feature from the upcoming Intel Haswell processor’s called VMCS Shadowing which aims to improve the performance of Nested Virtualization. This got me thinking about whether VMCS Shadowing could benefit VMware’s Nested Virtualization.

VMCS (Virtual Machine Control Structure) Shadowing works by reducing the frequency in which the guest VMM (virtual machine) requires assistance from the parent VMM. Its goal is to eliminate the VM-exits due to VMREAD and VMWRITE instructions executed by the guest hypervisor but this comes at a slight expense.

I reached out to one of the core engineers who helped to develop VMware’s Nested Virtualization technology, Jim Mattson, and asked whether or not we would benefit from the VMCS Shadowing feature. Well, it turns out that VMCS Shadowing can help, but we have also done some research in this area and developed some technology that would allow us to eliminate about 75% due to VMREAD and VMWRITE when running guest VMware Hypervisors using some interesting software techniques. The details of these software techniques are actually published in a research paper called Software Techniques for Avoiding Hardware Virtualization Exits on VMware’s Academic Program which is part of VMware Labs. Jim is one of the authors of the research paper and I would highly recommend you check it out if you are interested in more details.

To summarize, because of the techniques described in the paper, VMCS Shadowing will provide only a small benefit when running a VMware Hypervisor as virtual machine. However, it will greatly benefit other non-VMware Hypervisors running as a virtual machine, this is particular true for Hypervisors that perform egregious number of VMREAD and VMWRITE operations and that do not cluster well, such as VirtualBox for example.

The coolest part about the research and software techniques developed by Jim and team, is that the technology has already been incorporated into the existing VMware vSphere ESXi, Workstation and Fusion products. I often times forget that all the awesome-sauce technology that is being developed by VMware starts out in research academia and you can learn about other research topics by visiting the VMware’s Academic Program which includes publications, research papers and the popular VMware Technical Journals.