ESXi wont show 40Gig NIC Supermicro AOC-S40G-i2Q

[totibby]

I have a Supermicro AOC-S40G-i2Q card with dual 40Gig SFPs.

In ESXi 7.0 it does not shows the speed of the card as 40 Gig. I need to dedicate this for one of the VMs in full, but It only shows as 10Gbit max. Is this a limitation issue? How can I fix this? Do I need to add drivers?

Thanks.

[IRIX201110141]

The vNetwork Card within a VM when choosing vmxnet3 is always 10G from the GuestOS perspective. Its completely independent from the phys. Host HW.

The Networking speed from VM to VM can overcomes the virtual Nic as long as this VMs are on the same ESXi Hosts and vSwitch. Only when the traffic need to leave the ESXi than your phys. Networkcard counts in.

Btw. you need a lot of CPU Cycles for sure when would like to move around packets as fast as possible. A lot of GuestOS tuning may needed.

Regards,
Joerg

[totibby]

So in my situation there is only one VM on the machine configured as a firewall. The reason why I have it on vmware is because if i need to swap the hardware or do maintenance to it, it's easier to move the VM from one host to another.

So all the traffic is expected to be in and out on the 2x40 gig nic dedicated to that VM.

But if it is limited inside vmware is to 10gig that will not work.

[IRIX201110141]

Again.... the vmxnet3 is not limited to 10Gbit.  On an ESXi6.7 with Xeon Gold CPUs and with CentOS8 VM i can get up to 20 Gbits/s in one direction last time we played around.

Regards,
Joerg

[totibby]

Again... The issue is that the Physical 40G interface is showing as 10G and not as 40Gig.

My question was if this is a bug or is this normal to show a 40G interface as 10G ?

By now I have found that is not. VmWare does support the AOC-S40G-i2Q card in full and it should show up with two 40 Gig ports. There is also a driver that needs to be installed along with the AOC card to get it recognized and take advantage of the full speed.