Since releasing the USB Network Native Driver for ESXi Fling back in February, the feedback and support for this Fling has simply been amazing. I especially enjoy hearing from customers, almost on a weekly basis, on how they are taking advantage of this solution in their vSphere/vSAN/NSX home lab and enabling for more complex networking topologies.
When we released the fling, we had focused on the most popular USB 3.0 network adaptors that we had accessed to which were based on AX8817a, AX88179 & RTL8153 chipsets. The initial list started out with just 5 devices, but we knew there were going to be others. In fact, Songtao and I have received plenty of feedback from our customers on what they would like to see supported, including USB 2.0 network adaptors. Another highly requested feature that customers have been asking for is support for Jumbo Frames and this is usually in the context of setting up either an NSX-V or NSX-T environment.
Although we have been a bit quiet lately, especially since we both have extremely busy day jobs, we have been watching the feedback and updating our backlog on things to work on. Today, I am happy to announce the release of v1.1 of the USB Network Native Driver for ESXi. With this latest release, we now support an additional 9 USB NIC adaptors including support for some USB 2.0 devices. For a complete list of supported USB Network adaptors, please take a look at the Requirements page. In addition, we have also added support for Jumbo Frames (up to 4K) for both the AX88179 & RTL8153 chipsets.
I think customers will be very happy with this update and I just want to give a huge thanks to Songtao who has been working extremely hard on adding all of these new features in his spare time! Let us know what you think of the update by leaving a comment on the Fling's page, we do read it!
Any chance you might work on a native driver for Intel GPUs next? I have a Xeon E-2176G in my home lab that I would love to passthru the IGP into a VM.