I was doing some testing on my Apple 2018 Mac Mini with the latest ESXi 7.0 Update 1 release and I needed to setup a separate network connection as the onboard 10GbE was not working for me initially. I was out of ideas but I did remember that I still have my Apple Thunderbolt 2 to gigabit ethernet adapter which was something I had used quite a bit in the early days when I was using the Apple Mac Mini as my homelab system.
Like all recent Apple Mac's, the 2018 Mac Mini only supports Thunderbolt 3 (USB-C) ports and obviously not compatibility with the network adapter. Luckily, I did have an official Apple Thunderbolt 3 to Thunderbolt 2 adapter lying around which would allow me to connect the network adapter to the Mac Mini and to my surprise, it was automatically detected by the latest release of ESXi!
This partially came in a surprise because the Apple network adapter uses the Broadcom tg3 driver and I was not 100% sure if the native Broadcom (ntg3) would automatically claim this device since it was never officially supported.
Its definitely good to know this ethernet adapter still works as long as you have a TB2 to TB3 converter adapter and this should also work for any Intel NUC that have Thunderbolt 3 ports.
Hi, quick question, did you get gigabit speed out of this combo? I get a mere 100Mb on my MBP 16". Just curious if it's my setup or a generic thing. thanks
Yes, if you're using the Apple Ethernet adapter. If you're using some other USB NIC, its possible its getting claimed by the cdce driver which is hardcoded to 100Mbps
Interestingly enough I get 400 mbps upload, 1Gbps down from my MacMini (2012) using thunderbolt 2, however builtin nic is 1Gbps up and down.
I’ve been doing some testing and have the same results. The Apple Thunderbolt to 1 Gbps ethernet seems to max out at about 400 Mbps upstream.
Me too. Anyone find out the cause of problem? Is it related to the ntg3 driver?
has anyone confirmed if the the AKiTiO Thunder2 10G Network Adapter works in vmware
If it uses same chipset as T3-10GbE, then it should work with this driver https://www.williamlam.com/2019/04/new-thunderbolt-3-to-10gbe-options-for-esxi.html
Im having a bit of trouble getting the adapter chain working on a NUC10i7FNH - ESXI version 7.0 Update 1.
The internal physical NIC gets picked up with the driver ne1000 but the Thunderbolt NIC is no dice 🙁
Any ideas as to how i could get this working? Cheers
Thx for all the good info in this site! Do you know of any way to get drivers installed for the Airport Extreme wireless card to function in ESXi ?
No, not only is there not any WiFi drivers, ESXi doesn’t even know how to interact with requirements of WiFi (password, captive, etc)
You can always pass through WiFi controllers and use it in-guest
Hi there, thanks for all your articles and updates covering Apple hardware.
I was wondering if this also means that the TB2 Ethernet adaptor can be passed through to a VM? I have read a few forum posts here and there and have yet to see anyone successfully passing this through.
I own a mac mini late 2012 (i7, 2,6 ghz) and running esxi 7.03 for some years. now i got the thunderbolt 2 network adapter from apple but it is not seen in esxi. do i need another driver for it and where can i get it?