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Intel NUC from 32 to 64GB RAM!

Since the start of the the year I’ve been mulling over what upgrades to my Home Lab are in order. I’m doing a lot more VMware Horizon learning/testing and I’m prepping to take VCP-DCV, so I needed some capacity to make some cool things happen.

I was planning on buying a new NUC to get some extra capacity, but I decided to invest in a RAM upgrade instead. Considerably less cost outlay, less extra initial power consumption and theres a good possibly this extra headroom will be enough.

I’m going to do another post on my home lab setup, but for today I went successfully from 32 to 64GB RAM in my NUC7I7DNHE primary node.

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Intel NUC7i7DNHE Fan Noise

I was lucky enough to find a good deal on eBay for a good NUC to help build out my Home Lab. As an EUC/VMware Mobility Specialist I’m not looking to run any massive vSphere/vSAN deployments, just a nice box to run the usual suspects (AD, ADCS, Unified Access Gateway) to give me everything I need.

Unfortunately, I started running my setup during what should be known as the end of times in the UK (June/July 2018) where temperatures hardly dropped below 27 during the day. This meant keeping my kit cool was difficult so I put it down a a bit more ambient heat than usual. When I started getting some major fan noise due to an issue with Azure AD Connect services taking more CPU, I decided to try and change some settings to resolve it.

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Deleting a vSAN Partition

I set up VCSA (vCenter Server Appliance) running on a vSAN datastore, then wanted to move things around. I disconnected my ESXI hosts and deleted the VCSA appliance. Proper SDDC experts are probably crying at that statement not, but you learn by doing! I then had the issue where I was unable to delete the vSAN datastore.
To resolve this, I had to run thr following:
First enable SSH on your ESXI host. SSH into it and run:
esxcli vsan cluster leave
Once this was done, I was still unable to re-claim the disks back into regular datastores. I couldn’t remove the partitions via ESXi Web Client either, so resorted back to Google.
Run this:
esxcli vsan storage list
Run the command and get the VSAN UUID from one of them. If theres multiple, it doesnt matter!
esxcli vsan storage remove -u uuid
Once this has been run, you’re all good!
Disclaimer: this is a Lab… anything in production please contact VMware Support!
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Azure AD Connect MonitoringAgent High CPU – Server 2016

So… I’m running an AD on an Intel NUC, and after a recent set of updates the NUC started to sound like a hairdryer!
 
 The ESXi Host was reporting some pretty fantastic CPU numbers (considering there’s not a lot of workloads on this yet, 3 VMs doing not a lot).

 
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When having a look at the VM, I see most of the CPU being taken up by ‘Microsoft.Online.Reporting.Monitoring.Agent.Startup’. This is a component of Azure AD Connect, which I’m using to sync user accounts into Office 365 for my Lab.
 

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