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Quick Tip - Updating Firmware on Minisforum MS-A2

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I recently had to setup a couple more Minisforum MS-A2 which will be used to deploy VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) 9 for a special VMUG event at Broadcom's Palo Alto headquarters this week.

One of the first things I like to do with any new hardware system is to check the vendors website to make sure that I am running the latest firmware and drivers. I know many of you in the VMware Community have acquired the popular MS-A2 for VCF 9, so this is a good reminder to make sure your firmware is up to date!

My MS-A2 kits all shipped with the 1.0.1 version of the firmware and as of publishing this blog post, the latest version is 1.0.2. While reading the release notes for 1.0.2, I saw that one of the new feature is the ability to control the fan speeds, which was really the only negative feedback I had in my MS-A2 review, that fans were quite loud when any load was placed on the system.

Spoiler alert ... changing the fan speed to either balance and/or quiet did not make a difference 🤣 ... so YMMV with this new feature 😅

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ESXi on Minisforum MS-01

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In recent years, there have been a number of new players that have entered the mini PC market that have really been pushing the boundaries on small form factor systems. Minisforum is one such company, that was founded in 2018 and have been steadily producing more interesting kits to compete with some of the more established vendors in this space.

Early on, the kits from Minisforum were pretty comparable (compute, network and storage capabilities) with other vendors using the popular 4x4 design, pioneered by Intel with their Intel NUC platform. With each new generation of mini PCs from Minisforum, the chassis aesthetics started to become more unique and they started to have more differentiated offerings like broader CPU choices including some of the latest AMD desktop and mobile processors.

Even I was intrigued by some of Minisforum offers from a VMware perspective, but unfortunately Minisforum had no interest in collaborating when I had reached out a while back. Over the years, I stayed informed of new releases from Minisforum but nothing really stood out to me as much as their recent announcement of the Minisforums Workstation MS-01.


UPDATE (03/05/2024) - SimplyNUC has just launched the Onyx Pro, which is simply a rebrand of the Minisforums MS-01 and the review here also applies to the SimplyNUC Onyx Pro.

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