WilliamLam.com

Maximizing vSAN ESA Performance on Minisforum MS-A2

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I have been running the full VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) 9.0 stack using the Minisforum MS-A2 in a three-node configuration for almost a year now. While the MS-A2 is not hardware that you would find on the Broadcom Compatibility Guide (BCG), these units have been solid for my lab environment.

Over the past couple of weeks, I have been putting my lab through its paces while testing various VCF.Next deployment and upgrade scenarios, and I began to notice the environment was sluggish, which was not something I had experienced before.

Long story short, after hours of debugging, including over the weekend with the amazing Nicholas Wilson, we were able to pinpoint one of the issues (more details at the end for the other issue) related to the onboard 10GbE SFP+ adapters. The MS-A2 uses an Intel x710, which apparently have been quite notorious when it comes to hardware offload. 😵‍💫

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USB Native Network Driver for ESXi supports Realtek RTL8157 & RTL8156BG

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In response to community feedback, we are excited to announce an update to the popular USB Native Network Driver for ESXi Fling . This release is currently available for ESXi 8.0 Update 3 and adds support for the latest Realtek USB devices: RTL8157 (5GbE) & RTL8156BG (2.5GbE), bringing the total number of supported chipsets to over 25+. A similar update is also planned for ESX 9.0, which will be published hopefully in the next few weeks.

Several of you have asked about specific models compatible with the latest Realtek chipset. Below are the two I am currently using for testing, which you can find the links below. If you have other recommendations that work, feel free to share them in the comments.

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Installing Realtek Network Driver Fling using Free ESXi 8.0 Update 3e ISO

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The typical method for authoring a customized ESXi image that contains additional drivers and packages is by either using vSphere Lifecycle Manager (vLCM) if you already have a vCenter Server deployed or by using PowerCLI cmdlets which does not depend on vCenter Server to to create a new image.

In the latter option of using PowerCLI, users must provide a reference to the ESXi base image which can be be provided by using Broadcom's Online Depot (requires Broadcom Download Token) or served using a local ESXi offline bundle zip file.

As some of you may have observed over the years, not every single ESXi release (typically patch/updates) will include both an ISO and offline bundle deliverable. If you have an existing vCenter Server, you can download ANY ESXi release in either ISO and/or offline bundle format using vLCM.

What if you only had access to an ESXi ISO, can you still take advantage of some of the custom drivers including the recently released Realtek Network Driver for ESXi Fling?

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