Intel's latest 7th Gen Dawson Canyon NUCs are equipped with AMT vPro Technology. Intel AMT (Active Management Technology) allows remote management including a KVM Console. vPro is available in NUCs with i7 and i5 CPUs. NUCs with i3 CPUs do not have vPro Technology.
7th Gen NUCs with vPro Technology:
Activation and access to the Remote Console/KVM are a little bit hidden. This post explains how to enable and use the remote management. Read more »
Intel launched a commercial version of their 7th Gen NUCs. The new Dawson Canyon named NUCs are available with vPro technology which allows you to manage NUCs remotely. NUCs are not officially supported by VMware but they are very widespread in many homelabs or test environments. They are small, silent, transportable and have a very low power consumption, making it a great server for your homelab. Generation 7 Dawson Canyon NUCs are available with i3, i5 and i7 CPUs but only i5 and i7 are equipped with IIntel's vPro Technology. The i3 comes without vPro and has an identical CPU than the Baby Canyon. The i7 has a powerful 4 Core Kaby Lake-R CPU which give a great performance boost.
VMware is moving their vCenter Server from Windows to the Linux based Photon OS. The following tips and tricks might come handy when working with the vCenter Service Appliance 6.7:
vSphere 6.7 has been released and as known from previous versions, VMware provides a free version of their Hypervisor ESXi for everyone again. The license key can be created for free at VMware's website. It has no expiration date. The binaries you will receive as "Free Hypervisor" are 100% identical to the paid version but with some software limitations.
Tech Specs and Limitations
Other limitations like the 32GB Memory or 2 CPU Socket limit are no longer in place.
Beside Server Hardware, also double check if your IO Devices (eg. NIC, HBA,..) are supported when updating ESXi hosts from VMware vSphere 6.5 to 6.7. The following devices were supported in vSphere 6.5 but are according to VMware's HCL not (yet) supported in vSphere 6.7.
Double check your vendor support when updating ESXi hosts from to vSphere 6.7. Some systems have not been certified by their vendor yet. The following servers were supported in vSphere 6.5 but are according to VMware's HCL not yet supported in vSphere 6.7.
Your server is listed and you want to upgrade?
VMware vSphere 6.7 offers increased scalability. You can see a comparison against all previous versions at my ESX and vCenter Configuration Maximums page. Changes in VMware vSphere 6.7 are:
| vSphere 6.7 | vSphere 6.5 | vSphere 6.0 | |
| NVDIMM controllers | 1 | N/A | N/A |
| Non-volatile Memory | 1 TB | N/A | N/A |
| Virtual SCSI targets per virtual SCSI adapter | 64 | 15 | 15 |
| Virtual SCSI targets per Virtual Machine | 256 | 64 | 64 |
| Virtual RDMA Adapters per Virtual Machine | 1 | N/A | N/A |
| vSphere 6.7 | vSphere 6.5 | vSphere 6.0 | |
| Maximum Non-volatile memory per host | 1 TB | N/A | N/A |
| Logical CPUs per host | 768 | 576 | 480 |
| Maximum RAM per host | 16 TB | 12 TB | 12 TB |
| Number of total paths on a server | 4096 | 2048 | 1024 |
| LUNs per server | 1024 | 512 | 256 |
| Volumes per host | 1024 | 512 | 256 |
| vSphere 6.7 | vSphere 6.5 | vSphere 6.0 | |
| Virtual CPUs per virtual machine | 8 | 4 | 4 |
| Virtual Memory per virtual machine | 128 GB | 64 GB | 64 GB |
| vSphere 6.7 | vSphere 6.5 | vSphere 6.0 | |
| Hosts in linked vCenter Servers | 5000 | 4000 | 4000 |
| Powered on virtual machines in linked vCenter | 50000 | 30000 | 30000 |
| Registered virtual machines in linked vCenter | 70000 | 50000 | 50000 |
VMware vSphere ESXi 6.7 is here and while you might want to wait before you upgrade your production, it's time to explore the new features in your Homelab. I've received a few questions on whether it is safe to upgrade.
Short answer
ESXi 6.7 will run on 5th, 6th and 6th Gen NUCs just as ESXi 6.5
Long answer...
In vSphere 6.7 the command line interface esxcli has 62 new commands. Esxcli is a complete set of commands that you can use for troubleshooting, configuration or kickstart files. I have created and printed a mindmap to navigate through the namespaces more quickly. This post covers only basic namespaces, available on all ESXi 6.7 hosts. If you've installed additional software you might see more namespaces. I've also created mindmaps for ESXi 5.1, ESXi 5.5, ESXi 6.0 and ESXi 6.5.
ESXCLI in version 6.7 has 15 namespaces: Read more »
The VMware bare-metal hypervisor ESXi is in the market for over 10 years now. During that time it has been continuously refined and added with new features. Since vSphere 5.0, the hypervisor size is very constant and has not increased severely. In this post, I am going to have a look at how much the hypervisor footprint has been changed from ESXi 3.5 to ESXi 6.7.
