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You are here: Home / ESXi / Supported chipsets for the USB Network Native Driver for ESXi Fling

Supported chipsets for the USB Network Native Driver for ESXi Fling

04.23.2025 by William Lam // 4 Comments

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

Vendor Chipset VendorID ProductId
AQUANTIA AQC111U 0xe05a 0x20f4
AQUANTIA Aquantia Pacific 0x2eca 0xc101
ASIX AX88179 0x0b95 0x1790
ASIX AX88178a 0x0b95 0x178a
CISCO LINKSYS RTL8153 0x13b1 0x0041
DLINK RTL8156 0x2001 0xb301
DLINK AX88179 0x2001 0x4a00
INSYDE SOFTWARE CORP Insyde Software Corp. 0x0b1f 0x03ee
LENOVO RTL8153 0x17ef 0x3062
LENOVO RTL8153 0x17ef 0x3069
LENOVO RTL8153 0x17ef 0x720a
LENOVO AX88179 0x17ef 0x304b
LENOVO RTL8153 0x17ef 0x7205
NVIDIA RTL8153 0x0955 0x09ff
Qualcomm NA 0x1A56 0x3100
Qualcomm NA 0x0b05 0x1976
REALTEK RTL8152 0x0bda 0x8152
REALTEK RTL8156 0x0bda 0x8156
REALTEK RTL8153 0x045e 0x07c6
REALTEK RTL8153 0x0bda 0x8153
SITECOMEU AX88179 0x0df6 0x0072
SUPERMICRO Supermicro computer Inc 0x15d9 0x1b83
TP-LINK RTL8153 0x2357 0x0601
TRENDNET AQC111U 0xe05a 0x20f4

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.

More from my site

  • Sonnet Solo5G Multi-Gig (1G/2.5G/5G) USB Adapter works with ESXi
  • VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) using USB Network Adaptor
  • USB Network Adapters without using the USB Network Native Driver for ESXi
  • Updates to USB Network & NVMe Community Driver for ESXi 7.0 Update 3
  • USB Network Native Driver for ESXi Fling supports ESXi 7.0 Update 2

Categories // ESXi Tags // ESXi, usb ethernet adapter, usb network adapter

Comments

  1. *protectedRichard John Hughes says

    04/23/2025 at 9:08 am

    Are these all x86 ? Are there ARM USB drivers available?

    Reply
    • William Lam says

      04/23/2025 at 9:21 am

      Yes, this is x86 only. There was a version of ESXi-Arm that include Arm-variant of the Fling, but I think that needs to get updated but that would simply be a part of the ESXi-Arm ISO

      Reply
  2. *protectedKoenraads LTP says

    04/24/2025 at 10:18 am

    Will there be an USB Network card 2.5GB which does support real nickteaming?

    Reply
  3. *protectedTK says

    05/03/2025 at 4:38 pm

    Seems like free users are unable to use the fling: https://williamlam.com/2022/02/how-to-create-a-customized-esxi-iso-without-vcenter-server.html#comment-72600

    Reply

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William is Distinguished Platform Engineering Architect in the VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) Division at Broadcom. His primary focus is helping customers and partners build, run and operate a modern Private Cloud using the VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) platform.

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