Intel Core i7-1165G7 2.5GbE Box Running VMware ESXi and pfSense

[Will Taillac]

We virtualize pfSense on VMware ESXi with Veeam for backup using a recently reviewed fanless 2.5GbE Intel Core i7-1165G7 unit for massive gains

The post Intel Core i7-1165G7 2.5GbE Box Running VMware ESXi and pfSense appeared first on ServeTheHome.

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[EasyRhino]

Thank you for walking through something that I have considered doing, but am not going to try myself. Therefore it's nice to see it vicariously!

 

[BoredSysadmin]

Hey Will.
First, thanks for the article. One question:
Your old's "router" cpu, Skylake quicksync, is missing HEVC 10bit decoding/encoding. Is this what you meant, then you said
"I also had an idea to run my Plex transcoder on my little ESXi host via iGPU passthrough, and the i5-6500 T's Quick Sync encoder is not particularly stellar. "

Intel Quick Sync Video - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org

 

[WillTaillac]

Hey Will.
First, thanks for the article. One question:
Your old's "router" cpu, Skylake quicksync, is missing HEVC 10bit decoding/encoding. Is this what you meant, then you said
"I also had an idea to run my Plex transcoder on my little ESXi host via iGPU passthrough, and the i5-6500 T's Quick Sync encoder is not particularly stellar. "

Intel Quick Sync Video - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org

Yes, as well as I was lead to understand that in addition to newer codec support the later generations of Quicksync had functional quality improvements as well.

Regardless, right now I'm at a standstill regarding iGPU passthrough. I can configure it on a Windows VM but run into driver errors within the Windows VM. When I configure it on a Ubuntu VM, the moment that VM boots up the entire ESXi host freezes. I'll keep tinkering with it, but that is more of a longterm goal. Right now my current main server handles Plex transcoding and it has a beefy 12-core CPU to do it with, I would just like to downsize on the power draw and part of that would involve using an accelerator for transcoding rather than just raw grunt.

 

[BoredSysadmin]

Not sure if this would be helpful to you, but I'm running my plex on NUC PC with Pentium J5005 CPU. With quicksync hardware transcoding enabled, I tested it to handle four 1080p streams transcoded.
also, this seems like a decent guide:

ESXi 6.5 Passthrough Video Card/GPU to Plex VM | Karim's Blog

elatov.github.io

Passthrough of Integrated GPU (iGPU) for standard Intel NUC

Earlier this week I found out that it was possible to passthrough the Integrated GPU (iGPU) for standard Intel NUC which was motivated by a question I had saw on the VMware Subreddit. I have writte…

williamlam.com

 

[WillTaillac]

Not sure if this would be helpful to you, but I'm running my plex on NUC PC with Pentium J5005 CPU. With quicksync hardware transcoding enabled, I tested it to handle four 1080p streams transcoded.
also, this seems like a decent guide:

ESXi 6.5 Passthrough Video Card/GPU to Plex VM | Karim's Blog

elatov.github.io

Passthrough of Integrated GPU (iGPU) for standard Intel NUC

Earlier this week I found out that it was possible to passthrough the Integrated GPU (iGPU) for standard Intel NUC which was motivated by a question I had saw on the VMware Subreddit. I have writte…

williamlam.com

Yep. I've looked at the second one before. The problems I'm encountering seem specific to 11th gen (and up) systems. There is a bunch more stuff to try, but it'll have to wait for off-hours and when I can shut down my firewall and other VMs, since unscheduled ESX lockups are bad for them.

 

[BoredSysadmin]

Yep. I've looked at the second one before. The problems I'm encountering seem specific to 11th gen (and up) systems. There is a bunch more stuff to try, but it'll have to wait for off-hours and when I can shut down my firewall and other VMs, since unscheduled ESX lockups are bad for them.

fair enough. The solution is simple (but not cheap - get a second host and setup HA

 

[WillTaillac]

fair enough. The solution is simple (but not cheap - get a second host and setup HA

Haha. In effect I currently have that, since I still have the old host. But if something did blow up, my easier path to restoration would be to just restore the pfSense VM from backup

 

[WillTaillac]

No luck thus far. I read some stuff that folks had better luck with Debian and the iGPU passthrough, and I at least made it through the install. But as soon as it booted up properly and (presumably) loaded the iGPU driver, the ESX host hard locked again. I may just put this aside and come back in 6 months and see if folks have figured it out yet or not.