NIC Drivers - Install new, or leave?

[alainrussell]

Does anyone know if NIC drivers should be updated to newer versions or left alone (leave the version installed by VMWare updates). We're seeing some oddity with latency that doesn't seem related to IOPs or Congestion and I'm wondering if it's related to firmware/driver mismatches. The cards are Intel X540/I350 QP - the combined card, as well as separate X540 DP cards.

Current firmware is Dell release 17.5.10 (although this is showing as a downgrade to the 16.x firmware series in the Dell VCenter Openmanage tools).

Drivers are:

igb - 5.0.5.1

ixgbe - 3.7.13.7.14iov-NAPI

These appear to be the highest version by VMWare, the newer drivers are shown as Partner/Async.

We're running Dell 730xd servers so would be interested to know combinations other people are running.

Thanks

Alain

[elerium · Accepted solution]

ixgbe - 3.7.13.7.14iov-NAPI for X540 has known latency problems with VSAN (see SynchroNet | Intel 10 Gigabit X540-AT2 Driver/firmware Issues)

I've been using the following without issue since 6.2 release:

Intel X540-AT2 10GB NIC

  driver: ixgbe version 4.4.1 https://my.vmware.com/web/vmware/details?downloadGroup=DT-ESXI55-INTEL-IXGBE-4.4.1&productId=353

  firmware: 17.5.10 http://www.dell.com/support/home/us/en/04/Drivers/DriversDetails?driverId=6FD9P

[alainrussell]

Awesome, thanks - I'll push the newer drivers and see if that helps with the issue we see.

[alainrussell]

Thought I'd add a note on what we found. We upgraded the NIC drivers to current versions and were still seeing the latency issues - turns out a port on the vSAN vSwitch on a single ESXi server had fallen back to 1Gbps so a reset of this back to 10Gbps removed all the problems we saw. We're going to leave the drivers on the new versions for now and keep an eye on things.