Happy Thursday! I know many of you have been asking about the status and support for ESXi 7.0 Update 3 and the popular USB Network Native Driver for ESXi. It has taken a bit longer as Songtao (the Engineer behind the Fling) has also been extremely busy and was also recently on PTO. Although I know this is something folks use extensively, I do also want to remind everyone that this is provided as a Fling, which means it is developed and supported as time permits. I will certainly do my best to help get new releases out aligning with ESXi updates and as a reminder, a new version of the USB Fling will ALWAYS be required for major releases of ESXi, which also includes update releases.
In addition to supporting ESXi 7.0 Update 3, there are also a couple of minor enhancement/fixes, which you can checkout the release notes for more details.
As the title mentions, we also have an update for the Community NVMe Driver for ESXi Fling and this will only benefit customers running ESXi on the Apple Mac Mini 2018 or Apple Mac Pro 2019 and wanting to use ESXi 7.0 or newer. For more details, please check out the release notes.
Jeff Newman says
May it's time for this to stop being a fling and become incorporated into the hypervisor. After VMware deprecated so much existing hardware with version 7, maybe it's time for them to give more back to the community.
William Lam says
Please voice this through your VMware account team. This is MY way of continuing to give back to community but it’s not just hearing it from me but directly from customers and through channels like your account reps, which will speak volumes in addition to channels like the Fling
Tom says
The Fling hasn't been updated since May of 2021. Now 7.0U3g is released, I'm waiting for an update on the Fling. Could you tell us how long I have to wait for this update? My setup is dependant on it.
William Lam says
Which Fling are you asking about? The USB Fling was updated as of this year (May 2022) and it should work for latest 7.0 Update 3 releases
dcasota says
Unfortunately the PowerCLI add-esxsoftwarepackage process of creating an iso with ESXi7.0U3g including USB Fling (May 2022) actuelly doesn't work anymore and export-esximageprofile -ExportToIso fails with 'expected attribute swplatforms'.
ESXi with the older fling version 47140841 stops with the 'failed to check acceptance levels' issue which has been fixed with the May 2022 version.
It really would be nice to see the USB Fling built-in productized in vSphere 8 and in latest vSphere 7 versions as well! The leverage for edge devices will be tremendous.
baastow says
Hallo William, is there an update on the Fling for esxi 8, usb network adapter.
Greetings
Amnesia says
Since VMware has closed down flings webpage, is there any change you can provide the link for the community NVMe driver again?
William Lam says
vmwa.re/flings
Amnesia says
Thank you very much William 🙂 Will nvme-community-driver_1.0.1.0-3vmw.700.1.0.15843807-component-18902434 work with ESXi 8.0.2 as well?
Amnesia says
It works 😉
SemoTech says
Amnesia, in my testing it only worked with 8.0U1c (build# 22088125). When I did an upgrade in-place to 8.0U2 (build# 22380479) the community_)NVMe fling driver loaded, but failed to enable the 2TB on-board PCIe NVMe of my 2018 MacMini, so the Datastore was lost. I had to revert back to 8.0U1c. Let us know how your testing goes...
Really wish there was a fix for this....
William Lam says
No. It’s been depreciated and it’s only supported w/7.x, which has been case prior to Fling site going down
Kyaw Mya Tun Tun says
can i want to khow about community NVMe driver again ? download link
William Lam says
Read blog post
Lennart Koenraads says
Hello,
I need support for ESX 7.3o (build VMware ESXi, 7.0.3, 22348816) for a club3d cac-1420 USB adapter with the RTL8156 chipset.
I am installing: ESXi703-VMKUSB-NIC-FLING-55634242-component-19849370.zip, but every time i reboot the Physical adapters don't show the wright speed.
Can you help me with this one?
Sabarrudin Lee says
Hi William,
Trying to update my home lab NUC10 from 7.0U3g to 7.0U3n using the base image ISO provided by VMware but the installer doesn't detect my ADATA NVME drive. Will probably need to build a custom image for this using the Fling (have emailed Eric for the download link).
Any idea if the 7.0U3n image has support for NVME drives or would it be better to use vSphere8 instead?
Thanks in advance.