Intel NUC is the best piece of HW for HOME mini-LAB. But once you start grow you need more network bandwith. And one pNIC is not enough. After few sec of googling I find great page DevTTY. Where is a lot of information about “supported” USB NIC for your Intel NUC. I choose TP-LINK UE300 because I had a couple of TP-LINK (3210, 5426) switches and they are doing great job.
So I ordered TP-LINK UE300 USB 3.0 network card. Once it was delivered to me, I connected it to the NUC. Then download the driver from DevTTY and upload it to one of my datastore. No maintenance, reboot is needed. The only thing you need to do is to change the “Host Image Profile Acceptance Level” to “Community supported”.
Then just log in to the ESXi console and install VIB file with command:
esxcli software vib install -v /vmfs/volumes/datastore1/r8152-2.06.0-2_esxi60.vib
once it’s finished you can check that VIB is installed and loaded correctly by typing:
esxcli software vib list
once is VIB installed you can find new pNIC in my case “vmnic32” in “Configuration” -> “Network Adapters”.