I know many of you have been asking about this and today I am happy to share that the USB Network Native Driver for ESXi Fling is now supported with ESXi hosts running the latest 7.0 Update 1 release.
Note: The USB Network Native Driver is only supported with x86 ESXi and NOT with the ESXi-Arm Fling, there seems to be some confusion since these are two different CPU architectures.
In addition, there are a couple of minor enhancements (see changelog for details), but one feature that I am super excited to see incorporated into this version of the Fling is the automatic persistency of USB NIC binding, which maps physical USB NICs to either a Standard or Distributed Virtual Switch. Previously, this required users to update the local.sh script on ESXi to automatically restore the NIC bindings since the processing of these interfaces happens much later in the boot up process. These tweaks are no longer required when using this version of the Fling!
This enhancement was the direct result from Andrei Warkentin and his work on the ESXi-Arm Fling with the Raspberry Pi! Huge thanks to him for this contribution and hopefully we can repay that back one day with the integration of the USB Network Native Driver into the ESXi-Arm Fling 😉
Excellent news William. Thanks a lot for sharing!
In the past there was a 2TB limitation on thec external USB attached device.
Is this still an issue?
Any suggestion on how to overcome the inability to attach a large – 16TB – external hard drive to a host and make the WHOLE storage available?
[For reasons of e-discovery, et. , an offline – retired VM – needs to be archived outside of expensive online storage]
Please post questions/comments related to actual topic of the blog post. For other questions/comments, you can post on VMTN Communities
Great news !! Now if they could put the ne1000 NIC for all the previous Gen Intel NUC's back in, it would be a perfect world (I 'm guessing the Installed base Gen10 NUC's homelabs are a lot less, then all the previous generations that are suddenly dropped) Yes I know …..its all not certified and it's up to Intel to do that (which will never happen)
thx for everything buddy , stay safe and healthy
ilan
Would be nice if realtek did this for their NICs!
Interesting article and plenty of improvements made, so thanks a lot to everyone who is contributing to the Esxi development.
In regards to the Arm version, any updates on when a usb ethernet driver will be available?
My adapter can only perform 160 Mbps in download, creating a bottleneck…
Please, advice if I can post the request anywhere, thank you! Fabio