Intel NUCs are small, silent, transportable and have a very low power consumption, making it a great server for your homelab. On CES 2015 Intel officially presented their new Broadwell NUCs which will be available in a few weeks.
Intel NUCs are not officially supported by VMware but they have a great community support. They are proven in many homlabs or even for demonstrating Virtual SAN deployments.
- Broadwell CPU
- i7 NUC announced (Q2/2015)
- No changes in memory support (max. 16GB)
- Available with and withouth 2.5" HDD slot
| Model (2.5") | NUC5i7RYH | NUC5i5RYH | NUC5i5MYHE | NUC5i3RYH | NUC5i3MYHE |
| no 2.5" Slot | NUC5i5RYK | n/a | NUC5i3RYK | n/a | |
| Architecture | Broadwell (14 nm) | ||||
| CPU | i7-? | i5-5250U | i5-5300U vPro | i3-5010U | i3-5010U |
| Base Frequency | 1.6 GHz | 2.3 GHz | 2.1 GHz | 2.1 GHz | |
| Max Frequency | 2.7 GHz | 2.9 GHz | 2.1 GHz | 2.1 GHz | |
| Cores | 2 | ||||
| TDP | 15 W | ||||
| Memory Type | DDR3L SODIMM 1.35V 1333/1600/1866 MHz | ||||
| Max Memory | 16GB | ||||
| USB Ports | 2x USB 3.0 (front panel) 2x USB 3.0 (back panel) 2x USB 2.0 (internal) | ||||
| Storage | M.2 SSD Card SATA3 2.5" HDD/SDD | ||||
| Wireless LAN | Yes | No | Yes | No | |
| Bluetooth | Yes | No | Yes | No | |
| Gigabit LAN | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | |
| Launch | Q2 2015 | March 2015 | March 2015 | February 2015 | February 2015 |
I have three of the D54250WYK models and they are amazing work-horses for ESXi. The only downsides for this great boxes are the 16Gb RAM limit and only one NIC. Still for the size and power requirements, it's enough.
My blog post shows how to install ESXi 5.5 on these boxes - http://myrandomthoughts.co.uk/2014/12/intel-nuc-as-a-esxi-host-part-1/
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Hi,
Anyone found supported Vsphere 6 m.2 Nic's?
having just on is very annoying as it prevent HA from funning properly in Vsphere.
Steph.