I'm in the process of updating my hosts and while I'm at it, I thought I would check the NIC drivers. I have Intel I350-T4s installed:
PCI Dev ID: 0x1521
Dev ID: 0600
Vend ID: 8086
SubSys ID: 1
SubSys Vend ID: 8086
I checked the HCL and I'm presented with two igb driver versions:
5.0.5.1 and 4.2.16.3 (which is what I'm currently running).
I know in the past there were some tuning issues as related in this article:
VMware KB: Low virtual network I/O performance with Intel 1Gbps NIC using igb driver
I went to Intel and they mention some advanced capabilities of the v5 driver but focus more on Linux builds and not ESXi.
One other confusing issue is that while Intel says the v5 driver supports the I350 chipset, if you use the HCL and select the I350-T4, it takes you to the all of the drivers versions which includes both v4 and v5. The link to v4 mentions it supports the I350 chipset but the link to v5 only mentions the I210.
Wondering if anyone is using the v5 driver on ESXi 5.0U3? I'll be upgrading to ESXi 5.5 in about four months. Any issues or tweaks for the v5 driver?
Thanks for any feedback.
