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GPU Passthrough with Nested ESXi

05.09.2023 by William Lam // 9 Comments

Advancements in ESXi Nested Virtualization have given us the ability to run ESXi inside of a VM (Nested ESXi) and has allowed us to do just about anything you would with a physical ESXi host for development, testing and learning purposes. In fact, I have shared many tips and tricks for using Nested ESXi and Nested Virtualization over the years on my blog, which is worth bookmarking in case you are trying to do something and run into an issue which more than likely, I have come across.

Today, there is very little you can not do using Nested ESXi and is typically limited to a physical device that can not be virtualized and/or emulated in software.

I bring this up because I recently had a chat with Frank Denneman on an unrelated topic and he brought up the question about being able to double passthrough of a GPU from a physical ESXi host into a Nested ESXi VM which would then be passthrough'ed again to a VM running on that Nested ESXi system. While this was not the first time that I had heard of such a request, it does not come up often, this has only been the second time I have heard of this request. For context, his use case was for testing purposes and I can certainly see some interesting scenarios where you want to run vSphere in a Nested environment and still access all the vSphere capabilities including leveraging a physical GPU within that environment, whether that is AI/ML or other graphics process requirements.

My response to Frank was this will not work for a few reasons, one of which is that the use of Virtual Hardware-Assisted Virtualization (VHV) is not supported with DirectPath I/O and if the GPU is passthrough to a VM, even if it was running ESXi, it would be in control of the GPU, so how could one passthrough it again?

My curiosity got the better of me and given this was the second time I had ever been asked about this, I figured maybe it was worth exploring but before I go down anymore 🐇🕳️, I wanted to get quick sanity check from one of our graphics engineers on the remote feasibility of this ask.

[Read more...]

Categories // vSphere 7.0 Tags // Dragon Canyon, GPU, Intel NUC, Serpent Canyon

ESXi on Intel NUC 12 Enthusiast (Serpent Canyon)

11.18.2022 by William Lam // 16 Comments

The Intel NUC Enthusiast product line is typically geared towards content creators and gamers. These Intel NUCs, include Skull Canyon, Hades Canyon and Phantom Canyon, are all equipped with an onboard discrete GPU.


The Intel NUC 12 Enthusiast, codenamed Serpent Canyon, is the latest offering in this product line and it is also the first Intel NUC that includes both an Intel CPU and an Intel GPU, which is based on the latest Intel Arc graphics.

Within the VMware Community, both the Skull Canyon and Hades Canyon were extremely popular due to the additional graphics and storage capabilities at the time. With my recent updated findings on iGPU passthrough for recent Intel NUCs with ESXi and the combined compute and graphics solution from this latest offering from Intel, Intel NUC 12 Enthusiast can make for a pretty powerful and capable VMware setup!

Let's take a closer look at the new Intel NUC 12 Enthusiast from a VMware point of view!

[Read more...]

Categories // ESXi, Home Lab, vSphere 7.0, vSphere 8.0 Tags // homelab, Intel NUC, Serpent Canyon

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William is Distinguished Platform Engineering Architect in the VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) Division at Broadcom. His primary focus is helping customers and partners build, run and operate a modern Private Cloud using the VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) platform.

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