Supported chipsets for the USB Network Native Driver for ESXi Fling

A longtime community favorite, the USB Network Native Driver for ESXi Fling makes it super easy for users to expand additional networking capabilities for ESXi-x86.

While helping a customer recently, I realized that we did not have a published list of supported USB Network adaptors (VID/DID) for the Fling anywhere, especially after transitioning into the Broadcom system post Day 2.

Note: A quick heads up, the Fling downloads will be re-homed to the Broadcom Support Portal (BSP) under the Free Downloads next month. For more details, please see the announcement posted on the Flings Community.

Fortunately, I still had all of this information and below is the list of all the chipsets, which covers more than 90+% of what you will find in the market, that the Fling supports:

Supported Chipsets

Note: If you are looking for specific USB network adaptors, I have shared a few in this this blog post that have worked well for me.

Installation

If you already have ESXi up and running and you would like to install the Fling, you can use the following instruction below:

ESXi 7.x and later

esxcli software component apply -d /path/to/the/component.zip

ESXi 6.5/6.7

esxcli software vib install -d /path/to/the offline/bundle.zip

Reboot the ESXi host for the changes to go into effect.

If you do not have ESXi already installed because you do not have a supported PCIe-based network adaptor, then you will need to author a custom ESXi ISO that contains the Fling driver, which you can follow this blog post for both UI and CLI options.