FastEthernet (e100) no longer supported in ESXi 4?

[meeveo]

Hi Community,

are Intel FastEthernet Cards no longer supported in ESXi 4? I upgraded from ESXi 3.5 U4 to ESXi 4 and the gigabit interfaces are still working (e1000 Intel and tg Broadcom) but all Intel FastEthernet Cards (e100) are no longer available

Any idea?

Best regards,

Chris

[RenaudL]

Support for 100 Mbits nics was indeed dropped.

[meeveo]

A pity! Is there a reason why? Are e100 kernel modules a problematic?

[grcumm]

My guess is that since ESX(i) 4.0 requires a 64-bit processor for performance and optimizations, they figured the Fast Ethernet cards were too slow and not worth the work of development.

Besides, they've been saying (at least since ESX 3.0) that a Gigabit card is HIGHLY recommended for vMotion. I believe this is because Fast Ethernet is not fast enough to perform a High Priority vMotion and will most likely lead to some outage of the VM.

Also, Gigabit cards have been commonly available longer than the required 64-bit processors.

Just my educated guess.

[Roelofz]

... So the 100 MB cards are all not working, Gigabit cards are only mentioned if they cost a fortune, the widely available Realtek chipset is also not working, so how (without the so much needed community info) can I build the well wanted white box, without knowing what NIC to buy?

is the Intel PRO/1000 GT working for instance (working, not supported)?

Regards,

Roelof

[Bookworm370]

Pro 1000/GT uses the e1000 driver and therefor works.

It's the 100Meg eithernet cards that they dropped.

[rmrobert]

I think the cheapest NIC that ESX supports is probably a Broadcom card using tg3 driver. Although I don't know off the top of my head which cards from newegg have this.

I believe this $26 Intel card would work as well:

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E1683310612

[Roelofz]

Rmrobert and Bookworm,

Thanks for your replies, this helped me out!

I ordered the Intel GT card (at a local shop in the Netherlands), now awaiting delivery!

Regards,

Roelof

[Bookworm370]

Roelof

You ordered the right card. This one works flawlessly with ESXi.

[vancod]

Yes - I have these in both ESX and ESXi Hosts and they are fine.

[rorym]

This is a real bummer, I've just been working out a plan for a managed customer who wants 4x ESXi Servers with iSCSI shared storage on a tight budget, I was hoping to use only 1U servers, so I'm limited in the available expansion slots for network cards, one of the types of servers I'm considering is a 1U dual 6core Opteron server, which has 2x Gigabit TG3 Nics and 1x E100 if the E100 worked in ESXi 4 then this would be perfect, as the customer will only have a 10Mbit connection to the net, the E100 would be perfect for the Internet connectivity for the Virtuals, and the 2x Gigabit NIC's would be dedicated for iSCSI.

Has anyone any idea of any possible ways of putting e100 support back into ESXi4 (even if it breaks support) ?

Cheers,

Rory

[J1mbo]

IMO your customer would be much better off with Dell or HP servers than a white-box solution. Dell has an 'outlet' type store on it's website, which has what I believe to be customer returns deeply discounted but fully waranteed, and is worth keeping an eye on if purchase price is absolutely that much of a concern. As a bit of an aside, check that your servers have raid cards with battery-backed cache on them.

Please award points to any useful answer.