2.5Gbe Realtek Card in bridged mode. Only shows 1gb

[SonOfGomer]

So I have found various posts about realtek drivers in esxi as well as 2.5gbe driver questions for USB connections but...

My system has a 4 port 2.5gbe card that uses the realtek chip, it works fine on my host and I have it set up bridged into my VM's so they have dedicated 2.5gbe connections to my switch and can be assigned the correct vlans etc.  

My issue is that it only shows up as an intel 1gb connection in the VM and testing shows it is indeed limited to only 1gbps even though the host can push 2.5gb across them.

I have tried manually forcing the realtek drivers onto the network adapter in the VM (Obviously did not work) as well as changing the virtual network mode and the network mode in the VM settings.  Any tips or suggestions?

I am running workstation pro 17 and both the host and the guest OS are windows 11.

[louyo]

Sort of a SWAG, but your vm's see the VMware WS drivers, not the Intel drivers.

PCIe Passthrough is not available in WS, only vsphere/ESXi. We passthrough both video and NIC devices in ESXi but it creates some restrictions.  

[SonOfGomer]

I was afraid this was the answer.  I have been putting off moving my VM host onto a type 1 Hypervisor but it's becoming about that time it seems.  I use mostly workstation for work and it works just fine running as a service and auto starting my vm's etc on my home server but looks like its time to switch to a type 1 since I have upgraded my network to be multi-gig.

[Technogeezer]

Have you tried changing the virtual NIC type in the VMX file from "e1000e" or "e1000" to "vmxnet3" and seeing if the VMware "para-virt" NIC has better performance? (It will report to the guest as 10Gbit, by the way). 

[SonOfGomer]

Yeah I gave that a shot, unfortunately it just corrupted the VM so had to recover it.  They are windows 11 VMs, had to have TPM to install but I had afterwards removed the TPM and encryption in order to make them auto boot when the machine boots up (Can't autoboot an encrypted VM).

I am going to test on one without TPM removed to see if that works, also on a W10 VM to see if that works.  

I may just go with ESXI or Server 2022/hyperv on my main vm server just to get a type 1 anyways but am gonna give the above a shot to see if I can successfully pass 2.5 or 10gb through it, I have a 10gig nic in the server too so will try passing that through if I can get the 2.5 to work.

[SonOfGomer]

So spun up a brand new Win11 VM, made sure everything was working and updated, ran a speed test on it (got up to about 500mbps upload and 350 down).
Edited the VMX file to change it to VMXNET3 and now it won't boot, pops up an error asking if I want to remove the VM from my machine heh.

It does work on a windows 7 VM though, (The VMXNET3 driver).  I haven't done any speedtests with that because its actually on a shared 1gb connection but I may play around with that.  Perhaps its due to the encrypted nature of the Windows 11 install that is not allowing me to change the driver.