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Anyone tried Aquantia NIC with XPE in ESXi?


Maxhawk

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I've got ESXi 6.7U3 running on a Dell R510. The NICs include: (1) the built-in dual Broadcom 1Gbe ports, which work as expected, and (2) an Aquantia AQN-107 Nbase-T PCIe card which is not playing nicely with XPE. XPE uses loader 1.02b with DS3615xs 6.1.7 Update 3. The network is set up as VMXNET3 which is required to support 10 Gbe.

 

I have the Aquantia driver package installed in ESXi. ESXi reports it as a 10000 Mbps connection. I have an Ubuntu VM and an iperf test to it comes back at 10Gbit wire speed (940 Gbps) so I know ESXi and the NIC are working properly. 

 

With the AQN-107 I'm able to access the XPE GUI. The XPE network control panel reports a 10000 Mbps connection. However an iperf test fails and copying a large file from Windows (SMB) fails. Both tests work fine when I configure the VM to use the built-in Broadcom NIC. My thought is that since ESXi is providing a "virtual" network connection to XPE, no additional drivers should be necessary in the XPE loader. 

 

Any suggestions on what to try next?

 

I have two other ESXi boxes (R720xd & R310) running XPE 6.1.7 U3 that both use a Mellanox ConnectX-2 card and they both run at 10 Gbit speeds with no issue. I want to use the Aquantia card in the R510 because I have extra copper ports available but no more SFP+ ports available.

 

 

 

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the 6.2.2 driver package contains a aquantia driver and you could pathtrough the pcie nic to the xpenology vm, so the additional driver can handle the nic

if you want to keep the 10g nic inside the esxi you can still try the newer 6.2.2 and its vmxnet driver

i guess the cpu in that system is a older (2010) modell so you can only test 3617 and not 918+ (haswell and newer needed)

 

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13 hours ago, Maxhawk said:

Thanks for the suggestion, but as I recall, 1.03B with 6.2.x doesn't support 10 Gbe since there is no VMXNET3 driver. Or has there been advancements since I tried it a year ago?

 

jun's original driver pack already contains the vmxnet driver and so does the extended version

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