VMware ESXi compatible mini pcs

Mini PCs

Last Post by Brandon Lee 1 year ago

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Brandon Lee

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Feb 05, 2025 11:07 pm

(@brandon-lee)

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[#407]

I have tried out a lot of mini PCs over the past year or so especially and have uncovered several that are VMware ESXi friendly with Intel network adapters. I have put together a list of 5 of these that have some great features if you want to run mini PCs for your VMware-based home lab.

Asus 14 Nuc Pro - The Asus Nuc 14 Pro is a great little mini PC. The unit that was sent to me was configured with 32 GB of DDR5 memory and a 1 TB PCI-e Gen 4 NVMe drive. Notably, it is also the tall model they sell. The tall model is physically taller than the normal model, so it can accommodate a 2.5-inch SSD in the top lid. Keep this in mind as I think the tall option’s storage configurations would be much better for home lab environments
GMKtec Mini PC Gaming, M7 Pro - Uniform processor – it has the AMD Ryzen 9 PRO 6950H (8 cores/16 threads, up to 4.9 GHz) and this is a uniform processor with no performance and efficiency cores to deal with or boot parameters to use with ESXi
Beelink SEI14 - The Beelink Sei14 has some impressive specs for a little Mini PC. These include the following: 12th Generation Intel Core Ultra 5 125H Meteor Lake processor with base clock at 3.0 GHz and turbo up to 4.5 GHz.
MINISFORUM MS-01 Workstation Core i9-13900H - It really checks off most of the boxes that most have been holding off when thinking of using mini PCs for home labs. It is a compact mini PC that includes not one, but two 10 GbE adapters, and (2) 2.5 GbE adapters, along with (2) 40 gig USB-4 ports.
Minisforum NAB6 Lite - Minisforum NAB6 Lite it has the Intel Core i5-12600H processor. This CPU has 12 cores, 16 threads, 18MB cache, and a max turbo frequency of up to 4.5GHz. This CPU provides a good deal of processing power.