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Google Coral USB Edge TPU Accelerator on ESXi

05.10.2023 by William Lam // 37 Comments

Several weeks back, I came across a really strange post on the VMTN communities asking how to change the Device ID (DID) and Vendor ID (VID) for a USB Device that has been passthrough to a VM from ESXi? The device in question is the Google Coral USB Edge TPU (Tensor Processing Unit) Accelerator, which is a relatively in-expensive device that can help accelerate machine learning (ML) inferencing. With all the buzz these days with Generative AI and ChatGPT, I can only imagine its popularity has grown even further but I did not realize how popular this device has been in the community, especially for those wanting to use it with ESXi.

The initial observation reported by this user and also by many others in the Coral community was that ESXi was showing the incorrect VID/DID for the Coral USB device and because of this, it was not working correctly when passthrough'ed to a VM and they were looking for a way to change the DID/VID value from 1a6e:089a (Global Unichip Corp.) to 18d1:9302 (Google Inc.).

Interestingly enough, a couple of weeks ago, my buddy Alan Renouf had also shared that he recently purchased the Coral USB device, so I figured I would check with him first to see if he was observing the same behavior that was being reported, which he was. I had been going through the Github reports to try better understand the issue and some of the previous workarounds that users had done including disabling the vmkusb module, which I definitely not recommended, especially for more recent releases of ESXi where that will simply disable all USB functionality to your ESXi host.

I still could not wrap my head around the issue as the reports did not make any sense in terms of the DID/VID not being claimed correctly or that it needed to change to properly function. This also did not make sense when speaking with our USB expert (Songtao who also developed our USB Network Native Driver for ESXi), so I decided to bite the bullet and purchase the Coral USB device, which apparently is difficult to obtain unless you overpay on Amazon, which I did.

[Read more...]

Categories // ESXi, vSphere 7.0, vSphere 8.0 Tags // AI, Coral, ESXi 7.0, ESXi 8.0, ESXi 8.0 Update 1, TPU, usb

USB Network Native Driver Fling for ESXi 8.0 Update 1

04.26.2023 by William Lam // 27 Comments

Songtao and I are happy to share that we now have a compatible version of the USB Network Native Driver for ESX v1.12 Fling that supports the latest ESXi 8.0 Update 1 release! 🥳

This release also includes a couple of minor enhancement and fixes which are listed below:

  • Support for new DLINK RTL8156 device (0x2001:0xb301)
  • Updated maximum supported USB Network devices from 8 to 12
  • Resolved 2.5GbE link speed issue for RTL8156 adapter

Additionally, while ESXi 8.0 Update 1 has just been released, we know that not everyone will be on the latest version and these enhancement and fixes have also been ported to a version of USB Network Native Driver for ESX v1.12 Fling driver to also support ESXi 8.0, 8.0a, 8.0b, etc.

Use the following ESXi Component ZIP files based on your desired version of ESXi 8.x:

  • ESXi 8.0 - ESXi800-VMKUSB-NIC-FLING-64098182-component-21668107.zip
  • ESXi 8.0 Update 1 - ESXi80U1-VMKUSB-NIC-FLING-64098092-component-21669994.zip

Note: There are no plans to backport these enhancements/fixes to prior ESXi releases

Finally, if you are looking to create a custom ESXi ISO or Image Profile AND you either have an existing or can deploy a vCenter Server, please refer to this blog post for using vSphere Lifecycle Manager (vLCM) via the UI or PowerCLI to create your custom images.


If you do NOT have or can not deploy a vCenter Server (no hosts required), then you can refer to this blog post for using PowerCLI Image Builder to create your custom images, but make sure you update Python dependency to at least 3.7.9+ or you will run into this issue.

Categories // ESXi, vSphere 8.0 Tags // ESXi 8.0, ESXi 8.0 Update 1, usb, vSphere 8.0, vSphere 8.0 Update 1

How to recover ESXi installed on USB device after disabling vmkusb module?

01.12.2023 by William Lam // Leave a Comment

I have to say, this is one of the more interesting challenges that I have come across in quite some time. A user was looking for assistance after they accidentally disabled the vmkusb module, which is the USB driver for ESXi and allows it to communicate with USB devices that are connected to the system.

The vmkusb module also plays a very critical role if you have ESXi installed on a USB device, as the driver is required for proper functionality such as being able to save the ESXi state and configurations to the USB device. So what happens when you disable the vmkusb module and you reboot the ESXi host, which is also installed on a USB device?

Well, everything continues to work including VMs since ESXi by design runs in memory after the initial boot from the USB device. However, any configuration changes made after that is lost after a system reboot including the attempt to re-enable the vmkusb module since ESXi is unable save any of the settings to the USB device. Fortunately, I was able to help the user out as I had a few ideas on how we could fully recover from this type of scenario and hence the blog post.

Hopefully a lesson can be learned here, do not make changes or disable things that you are not familiar with 🙂

[Read more...]

Categories // ESXi Tags // ESXi 7.0, ESXi 8.0, usb, vmkdevmgr, vmkusb

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Author

William Lam is a Senior Staff Solution Architect working in the VMware Cloud team within the Cloud Infrastructure Business Group (CIBG) at VMware. He focuses on Cloud Native, Automation, Integration and Operation for the VMware Cloud based Software Defined Datacenters (SDDC) across Private, Hybrid and Public Cloud

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