guest systems show fibre 10g adapters as twisted pair

[anancablenet]

Hi,

I have installed esxi 5.1 on a assembled intel 5500bc motherboard along with a dual port intel 10g fibre lan card.

The has gone smooth on the vmware side, i do see that within vmware ethtool shows the adapter as fibre.

But the guest system is showing the virtual card as twisted pair.

why is this and how can i solve this problem,

please do help  me out.

# ethtool vmnic3

Settings for vmnic3:

        Supported ports: [ FIBRE ]

        Supported link modes:   1000baseT/Full

        Supports auto-negotiation: Yes

        Advertised link modes:  1000baseT/Full

        Advertised auto-negotiation: Yes

        Speed: Unknown! (10000)

        Duplex: Full

        Port: FIBRE

        PHYAD: 0

        Transceiver: external

        Auto-negotiation: on

        Supports Wake-on: d

        Wake-on: d

        Current message level: 0x00000007 (7)

        Link detected: yes

vyatta@vyatta-testing1:~$ sudo ethtool eth0

Settings for eth0:

        Supported ports: [ TP ]

        Supported link modes:   1000baseT/Full

                                10000baseT/Full

        Supports auto-negotiation: No

        Advertised link modes:  Not reported

        Advertised pause frame use: No

        Advertised auto-negotiation: No

        Speed: 10000Mb/s

        Duplex: Full

        Port: Twisted Pair

        PHYAD: 0

        Transceiver: internal

        Auto-negotiation: off

        MDI-X: Unknown

        Supports Wake-on: uag

        Wake-on: d

        Link detected: yes

Thanks in advance

[MKguy · Accepted solution]

Are you using a vmxnet3 vNIC on the VM? This is perfectly normal as the hardware the guest sees is completely abstracted from whatever physical your host has and the generic virtual device is not related to the physical NICs. You could have a 10Mbit BNC physical connection, or a WLAN adapter for that matter, and the guest would still always see a 10GbE virtual Ethernet NIC. So don't worry about that, this is perfectly fine.

The only way you would be able to really pass physical properties of a device to a VM would be via vmdirectpath passthru, which presents the physical PCI(e) device directly to the guest but that is something very unusual which generally makes no sense in 99% of environments.