Starting in January 2013, my Intel NUC series is now over has reached the heady heights of double digits over the past few years, so I figured it might be handy to make them a bit easier to find!
The clue is in the name! Info on Synology storage and Cisco SG300-10 switches. I have subsequently added a further 3 Synology NAS boxes and a Cisco SG300-20!
I have been running a variety of Intel NUC nodes in my vSphere homelab over the past 3 years now, including the D34010WYKH, DC3217IYE & DC53427HYE.
In that time I have unfortunately seen more than my fair share of USB drive failures and corruptions, generally with an error which looks something like this:
These are not cheap and nasty, or freebie USB drives, so I would not normally expect to see this rate of failures. The error only occurs when you reboot the host, and the startup bombs out at the start of the hypervisor launch. I have often managed to recover the stick by copying back corrupted files from another instance, but generally I needed to rebuild and restore the image. An unnecessary pain in the rear!
The Root Cause The NUC case can become quite warm during normal operation with or without the fans spinning up, and I have come to believe that the main reason for the corruptions is that the USB stick itself is getting too hot and therefore eventually failing. Having pulled a USB out from a recently shut down node, they are really quite hot to the touch. You don’t actually see the symptom / failure until a reboot because the ESXi image actually runs in memory, so is only loaded from the USB stick at boot time.
The Solution As for the solution, it’s really quite simple. I purchased a number of 12cm (5 inch) USB 2.0 extender cables on eBay for just 99p each (including delivery!).
These keep the USB stick indirectly attached to the NUC chassis, and as such the heat does not transfer into the flash drive. Since doing this I have not seen any further issues with the corruptions. Job done!
I successfully ran my VMware vSphere ESXi 5.1 Nanolab for 18 months on my pair of Intel NUC DC3217IYE hosts. Early this year I got around to upgrading to 5.5. I had experienced some issues with my vCenter Server Appliance so ended up just rebuilding the lab from scratch and reattaching my old data stores. Having written all of this up, I then promptly forgot to post it! So for the sake of continuity (before I do the same for 6.0 shortly), this article covers the process.
In addition I also purchased a 3rd node for my lab, the 4th Gen D34010WYKH model (also with a Core i3), with which I was able to test and prove the process on as it uses the same NIC chipset.
The following are updated instructions for installing vSphere 5.5 on Intel NUC (any model with the Intel® 82579V or Intel® I218V onboard NIC should work).
I recommend before you start, you upgrade the NUC to the latest firmware, to avoid any potential bugs (of which there were a few when they were first released). Copy the latest firmare image onto a USB stick, boot the NUC, hit F7 at the bios, find your firmware on the USB stick and let it do it’s thing:
Intel NUC Firmware Upgrade
vSphere 5.5 Install Requirements
A USB Stick. This should work on anything over 1-2GB but personally am using 8GB PNY Micro Sleek Attache & 16GB Kinston DataTraveler Micro drives as they’re tiny, so less likely to catch on anything as they stick out the back of the NUC box, and they cost less than £5 each.
A copy of VMware Workstation 8 / Fusion 6 or newer.
If you do choose to add this in as well to your image, simply run the customiser twice, once for the network VIB, then a second time for the SATA vin, using the interim image as your source for the final image.
Process Overview
Create a customised ISO with the additional Intel driver.
Install ESXi to your USB stick using VMware Workstation / VMware Fusion and the customised ISO you will create below.
Plug in your NUC, insert the USB stick, boot and go!
Part One – Create the Custom ISO
Run the ESXi-Customizer-v2.7.2.exe (latest version at time of writing).
This will extract the customer to the directory of your choosing.
Navigate to the new directory.
Run the ESXi-Customizer.cmd batch file. This will open up the GUI, where you can configure the following options:
Path to your ESXi Installer
Path to the Intel driver downloaded previously
Path where you want the new ISO to be saved
Ensure you tick the Create (U)EFI-bootable ISO checkbox.
ESXi-Customizer with 2.3.2 vib
This will output a new custom ESXi installer ISO called ESXi-5.x-Custom.iso or similar, in the path defined above.
Part Two – Install bootable ESXi to the USB stick.
I stress that this is my preferred way of doing this as an alternative is simply to burn your customised ISO to a CD/DVD and boot using a USB DVD-ROM. That would however be a whole lot slower, and waste a blank CD!
Plug your chosen USB stick into your PC.
Open VMware Workstation (8 or above), VMware Fusion, or whatever you use, ideally supporting the Virtualize Intel VT-x/EPT or AMD-V/RVI option (allowing you to nest 64-bit VMs).
Create a new VM, you can use any spec you like really, as ESXi always checks on boot, but I created one with the similar specs as my intended host, single socket, 2vCPU cores. RAM doesn’t really matter either but I use at least 4GB normally. This does not require a virtual hard disk.
Once the VM is created, and before you boot it, edit the CPU settings and tick the Virtualize Intel VT-x/EPT or AMD-V/RVI checkbox. This will reduce errors when installing ESXi (which checks to ensure it can virtualise 64-bit operating systems).
VMware Workstation Nesting
VMware Fusion Nesting
Set the CD/DVD (IDE) configuration to Use ISO image file, and point this to the customised ISO created earlier.
Once the above settings have been configured, power on the VM.
As soon as the VM is powered on, in the bottom right of the screen, right click on the flash disk icon, and click Connect (Disconnect from Host).
Attach USB in VMware Workstation
Attach USB in VMware Fusion
This will mount the USB stick inside the VM, and allow you to do a standard ESXi installation onto the stick.
ESXi Install
At the end of the installation, disconnect the stick, un-mount and unplug it.
Install Complete
Part Three – Boot and go!
This is the easy bit, assuming you don’t have any of the HDMI issues I mentioned in the first post!
Plug your newly installed USB stick into the back of the NUC.
Don’t forget to plug in a network cable (duh!) and keyboard for the initial configuration. If you wish to modify any bios settings (optional), you will also ideally need a mouse as the NUC runs Visual BIOS.
Power on the NUC…
Have fun!
That’s it!
Any questions/comments, please feel free to hit me up on twitter as I have recently disabled comments on my blog due to the insane volumes of spam bots they were attracting!
Just a very quick tip for an annoying issue I have experienced with my Intel NUC DC53427HYE and never quite found the time to look into it and find a proper fix, that is until a recent twitter conversation! Kudos and many thanks to Frank Brix Pedersen and Mads Fog Albrechtslund for finding the solution and an EU reseller, and Frank for testing and posting it on his blog site.
If you have a vPro NUC and dont connect it permanently to a screen, then when you next connect to it via the vPro remote KVM interface, you get nothing but a blank black screen.
Frank has the NUC5i5MYHE model, but the fault looks identical to the issue I have been seeing so I will be following his post and purchasing a Fit Headless dongle from Tiny Green PC for £12 (and a rather ripoff £12 postage cost unfortunately, but there don’t seem to be any other UK suppliers). It is also available from opencompany.dk for others in the EU.
I will update this post once I have tested it on the DC53427HYE!
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