Is it possible to use 2.5Gbps+ NIC in virtual DSM for ESXi?

[Al lex]

I have baremetal DSM with realtek 8125 NIC that works fine

I also have virtualisation server

Certainly I'd like to use the only server for both

I've tried to migrate DSM to ESXi 6.7, 7.0, 8.0 several times, but speed limits always prevailed and I am still on barmetal

1. I'v tried realtek 8125 passthrogh mode and got speed of 120 to 170 mbps depending on installation. I'v never got connection between installations and speed limits.

2. I'v tried intel i225 installed on ESXI since that's the only 2.5Gbps NIC working with ESXi 7.0+ but seems DSM VM just ignored 2.5Gbps option and I got 100Mbps

So my question is what NICs I can use in ESXi to get speed of 2.5Gbps or more and if this NIC may be appliable to ESXi or passthrough is the only option

 

[WanWizard]

Throughput to the network is only determined by the vmnic.

 

ESX virtual NICs don't have speed limits, they are a memory construct, and are therefore as fast as the CPU can shift the packets. They are not aware of any attribute of the physical vmnic assigned to the vswitch. The way the NIC is reported inside the VM guest is not relevant, just cosmetic.

 

My DSM only sees the VMNET3 nics, which are linked to portgroups on a vswitch with two 10G NICs, and ipref3 shows it can use a fair chunk of that bandwidth.