When you try to install VMware ESXi 6.0 on the latest Skull Canyon Intel NUC (NUC6i7KYK), the installation fails with one of the following error messages:

Error loading /tools.t00

Compressed MD5: 39916ab4eb3b835daec309b235fcbc3b

Decompressed MD5: 000000000000000000000000000000

Fatal error: 10 (Out of resources)

Error loading /tools.t00

Compressed MD5: 000000000000000000000000000000

Decompressed MD5: 000000000000000000000000000000

Fatal error: 15 (Not found)



This problem is caused by the Thunderbolt Controller, which is a new component in the NUC6i7KYK, and therefore only the Skull Canyon NUC is affected. The problem can be solved by temporarily disabling the Thunderbolt controller during installation.

To successfully install ESXi 6.0 on the NUC6i7KYK:

Create a bootable USB Installer with Rufus (Howto: Bootable ESXi Installer USB Flash Drive) and plug it into the NUC Power on the NUC and press F2 to open Intel Visual BIOS Navigate to Advanced > Devices > Onboard Devices and disable Thunderbolt Controller Install ESXi Restart the NUC, enter BIOS and re-enable thunderbolt Controller

The NUC works with an unmodified version of ESXi 6.0 Update 2, including:

Network Adapter I219-LM (PCI ID: 8086:15b7)

NVMe Controller (The NVMe driver, which replaces the AHCI driver are included in the ESXi Image. Packages like xahci are not required)

Additional notes:

The SD Slot does not work with ESXi

I could not verify the Thunderbolt Port. (Are there any TB v3 devices in the market yet?)

If you need additional Network Adapters, the best solution is to use an USB 3.0 NIC with the vghetto-ax88179 driver by William Lam.

We had a nice email discussion in the last week regarding the error, brought together by Raymond Huh. Together with VMware employee William Lam (virtuallyGhetto) and an engineer in the background, Paul Braren (TinkerTry) and Olli Salonen (The NUC Blog). William Lam has also written about the solution with some further recommended BIOS Settings: ESXi on the new Intel NUC Skull Canyon. Very nice to see that we have smart guys that can get unsupported non-enterprise stuff to work on weekends.