VMware – Page 110 – Stanislav Musil

new NUC in my home lab

Home LAB starts to grow. More and more test lab VM’s, nested ESXi hosts etc. So I was looking for another node. Dont want to spent a fortune so the price was the key. I had also other minimum requirements as 32GB of RAM and power consumption. After few weeks of searching I decide to buy a Intel NUC.

Components added to my #HOMELAB:

Intel 6th Generation NUC NUC6i3SYH
2x Kingston 16GB DDR4 2133MHz SODIMM
USB3 TP-LINK UE300 gigabit NIC
8GB San Disk Cruzer Fit
HDMI to VGA adapter

Disclaimer: The Intel NUC is not on VMware’s official Hardware Compatibility List (HCL)

Troubleshooting Guide – NSX 6.2 for vSphere

The NSX Troubleshooting Guide describes how to monitor and troubleshoot the VMware® NSX™ system by using the NSX Manager user interface, the vSphere Web Client, and other NSX components, as needed.

You can download PDF HERE.

quick perf test of NUC onboard and USB3 pNIC.

I was just curious if the USB 3.0 pNIC TP-LINK UE300 is fast enough. So run quick vMotion test. And the result you can see on the picture.

vmotion perf test of usb3 and onboard

2nd NIC for my NUC

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:

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