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2020

ESXi on 8th Gen Intel NUC (Coffee Lake - Bean Canyon)

Intel's Coffee Lake-based 8th Gen Bean Canyon NUC is an ideal candidate for running VMware ESXi. 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 very low power consumption, making it a great server for your homelab. The Bean Canyon is available with i3, i5, and i7 CPU. It's the first series where the i5 is also equipped with a Quad-Core CPU, so both - the i5 and i7 - are ideal candidates for ESXi.

  • NUC8i7BEH/NUC8i7BEK (Intel Core i7-8559U - 4 Core, up to 4.5 GHz)
  • NUC8i5BEH/NUC8i5BEK (Intel Core i5-8259U - 4 Core, up to 3.8 GHz)
  • NUC8i3BEH/NUC8i3BEK (Intel Core i3-8109U - 2 Core, up to 3.6 GHz)

Read More »ESXi on 8th Gen Intel NUC (Coffee Lake - Bean Canyon)

Intel NUC with 64GB Memory Support (6th - 10th Gen)

Intel NUCs can go up to 32GB Memory for about 5 years. With the growing memory requirements of VMware Software, these numbers have become a problem in NUC based Homelabs. Luckily, single 32GB Modules are available and affordable now which boosts many NUC generations up to 64GB.

At the moment, a few vendors are providing single 32GB DDR4 SO-DIMM modules. I highly recommend getting the Samsung M471A4G43MB1 module, which is not only very affordable and available but also listed on Intel's compatibility list for 10th Generation NUCs. A single 32GB Module costs about $130 at the moment. The price has dropped massively in the last 12 months. In February 2019, a single module was available for $380. The lowest price was around Christmas 2019 at $112. Currently (March 2020) the module is available for $124.
Read More »Intel NUC with 64GB Memory Support (6th - 10th Gen)

Backup vSphere Cluster with ghettoVCB

The ghettoVCB script is a well known free backup solution for standalone ESXi Hosts created by William Lam. The script works with ESXi 3.x up to ESXi 6.7. It does not support vCenter or cluster backups out of the box but with a little workaround, you can backup virtual machines in a DRS enabled cluster. I'm using this type of backup for a couple of months without issues.

Read More »Backup vSphere Cluster with ghettoVCB

Adding ESXi Host to an EVC enabled Cluster fails

Adding an ESXi host to an EVC enabled vSphere 6.7 Clusters fails with the following error message:

The host's CPU hardware does not support the cluster's current Enhanced vMotion Compatibility mode. The host CPU lacks features required by that mode.

  • com.vmware.vim.vmfeature.cpuid.mdclear
  • com.vmware.vim.vmfeature.cpuid.fcmd
  • com.vmware.vim.vmfeature.cpuid.ssbd

See KB 1003212 for more information.
Host is of type: vendor intel family 0x6 model 0x8e
The target host does not support the virtual machine's current hardware requirements.

The cluster is running with EVC Mode "Haswell" and contains hosts with "Skylake" and "Kaby Lake G" CPUs while the new host has a "Kaby Lake" CPU. There is no reason why it shouldn't be possible to add the host to the cluster. All Hosts are running ESXi 6.7 U3 (Build 15018017).

Read More »Adding ESXi Host to an EVC enabled Cluster fails