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USB Network Native Driver now supports ESXi 7.0 Update 1

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I know many of you have been asking about this and today I am happy to share that the USB Network Native Driver for ESXi Fling is now supported with ESXi hosts running the latest 7.0 Update 1 release.

Note: The USB Network Native Driver is only supported with x86 ESXi and NOT with the ESXi-Arm Fling, there seems to be some confusion since these are two different CPU architectures.

In addition, there are a couple of minor enhancements (see changelog for details), but one feature that I am super excited to see incorporated into this version of the Fling is the automatic persistency of USB NIC binding, which maps physical USB NICs to either a Standard or Distributed Virtual Switch. Previously, this required users to update the local.sh script on ESXi to automatically restore the NIC bindings since the processing of these interfaces happens much later in the boot up process. These tweaks are no longer required when using this version of the Fling!

This enhancement was the direct result from Andrei Warkentin and his work on the ESXi-Arm Fling with the Raspberry Pi! Huge thanks to him for this contribution and hopefully we can repay that back one day with the integration of the USB Network Native Driver into the ESXi-Arm Fling ?

ESXi 7.0 Update 1 now includes NIC driver for Intel NUC 10

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With the upcoming release of vSphere 7.0 Update 1 and specifically ESXi 7.0 Update 1, support for the onboard NIC of the Intel NUC 10 (Frost Canyon) is now included and the community ne1000 VIB driver is no longer needed. If you had previously installed the community driver, you can uninstall the VIB after successfully upgrading to ESXi 7.0 Update 1.

USB Network Native Driver Fling for ESXi v1.6

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The popular USB Native Driver Fling for ESXi has just been updated to version 1.6 and is one of our larger releases.

Here are some of the key new features, for complete list, please refer to the Changelog tab on the Fling site.

  • Support for 4 additional USB NICs including the highly requested RTL8156 which is a 2.5GbE USB NIC and can be found on Amazon for as low as $25 USD. For more details, please refer to Requirements tab on the Fling site.
  • Support for persisting VMkernel to USB NIC MAC Address mappings which was an issue when using multiple USB NICs. Upon reboot, ESXi may randomize the mappings which can cause issues. For more details on this feature, please refer to the Instructions tab on the Fling site.
  • Simplified method for persisting USB NIC bindings. For more details, please refer to the Instructions tab on the Fling site.