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.
Direct Amazon Affiliate links (I earn a small commission on these)
Asus 14 Nuc Pro - https://amzn.to/42GZJJf
GMKtec Mini PC Gaming, M7 Pro - https://amzn.to/3CD7bdM
Beelink Intel Mini PC SEI14 - https://amzn.to/4hp4Pyo
MINISFORUM MS-01 Workstation Core i9-13900H - https://amzn.to/4i1rkcP
Minisforum NAB6 Lite - https://amzn.to/3Eor0Go
If you want to check this out on Kit.co, I have created a kit that contains all of these mini PCs along with videos: