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Thunderbolt to 10GbE Network Adapters for ESXi

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I was recently made aware of this article in which the author, Karim Elatov, had successfully demonstrated the use of a Sonnett Thunderbolt 2 to 10 Gigabit Ethernet Adapter with ESXi running on an Apple Mac Mini. As far as I am aware of, this may be the first public confirmation that such a device would work with ESXi, not to mention having it functional on the Mac Mini. I know in past years, there have been unconfirmed reports on various forums mentioning a Thunderbolt to 10GbE solution that works with ESXi but it was unclear on whether custom drivers were needed or if it would even work with newer versions of ESXi.


This topic has been popular amongst our customers who virtualize Apple MacOS on vSphere. In fact, several years back I had written an article on Thunderbolt Storage for ESXi, which includes a number of solutions that our customers have implemented to provide remote storage for their vSphere infrastructure running on either an Apple XServe, Mac Pro or Mac Mini. Questions around a functional Thunderbolt to 10GbE has definitely been asked about, but I had never heard from any customer who have had a successful story to share, at least until now.

From Karim's post, it looks like he was able to get this working using ESXi 6.0 but it was unclear if there was anything he needed to do to get the device recognized. I reached out to Karim and he was able to confirm that the Thunderbolt device was recognized by ESXi without any additional driver installation. In fact, if you look at this console output on his blog, you will see that it simply uses the inbox Intel ixgbe driver. I had also asked if Karim tried this with the latest version of ESXi, which is currently at 6.5 Update 1. Karim was kind enough to perform one additional test for me which was to confirm the device would still work with the latest ESXi release, which you can see for yourself in the screenshot below.

UPDATE (02/04/19) - Chad Moon recently shared his experiences on getting 10GbE support with an Intel NUC using the OWC Mercury Helios 3, Thunderbolt3 to PCIe expansion enclosure

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Automated NSX-T 2.0 Lab Deployment

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Last week, I had spent some time exploring and getting myself more familiar with NSX-T, which is the next generation release of the NSX platform from VMware. One of the first thing I do when learning about a new product is to setup a lab environment that I can using. Having gone through the deployment once by hand, I realized it would be quite painful if I needed to do this again, which I know I will and I did 🙂 I wanted to have a simliar experience to my vGhetto Automated vSphere Lab deployment script which also including setting up the entire vSphere infrastructure along with deploying and configuring NSX-V and extending it to support NSX-T.

Since my original script leverages PowerCLI to access both the vSphere and NSX APIs, I wanted to do the same with NSX-T. Funny enough, the PowerCLI team had just published an update release (6.5.3) which also added support for NSX-T and I thought this was perfect timing to try out the NSX-T APIs, which I had never used before.

UPDATE (01/01/2018) - I have verified the script also works with the latest NSX-T 2.1 which was just released before Christmas. The script has also been updated to create a new Edge Uplink Profile along with an Edge Cluster and automatically associate all Edge VMs to Edge Cluster.

I have created a new Github repository called vghetto-nsxt-automated-lab-deployment which contains detailed instructions along with the PowerCLI script.

Here is what the script is currently performing:

  1. Deploy and configure vCenter Server Appliance 6.5u1
  2. Deploy and configure 3 x Nested ESXi 6.5u1 Virtual Appliance VMs and attaching it to vCenter Server
  3. Deploy NSX-T Manager, 3 x Controllers & 1 x Edge and setup both the Management and Control Cluster Plane
  4. Configure NSX-T with IP Pool, Transport Zone, Add vCenter Server as Compute Manager, Create Logical Switch, Prepare ESXi hosts, Create Uplink Profile & Add configure ESXi hosts as a Transport Node

Similiar to the vSphere version of this script, all deployed VMs will be placed inside of a vCenter vApp construct as shown in the example screenshot below:


Here is an example output of a succesful deployment and you go from nothing to a fully functional NSX-T environment in just 50 minutes, which is pretty awesome if you ask me!?

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AHCI (vmw_ahci) performance issue resolved in ESXi 6.5 Update 1

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For customers who had SATA controllers that consumed the VMware Advanced Host Controller Interface (AHCI) driver found that after upgrading to ESXi 6.5, the disk performance for those devices were significantly impacted. Basic operations such as cloning or uploading an OVF/OVA would literally double if not triple in time. In fact, I too had observed this same behavior when I had upgraded my Intel NUC (not an officially supported platform) to ESXi 6.5. One thing I had noticed at the time when others were reporting simliar issues was that their HW platforms were also not on the VMware HCL, so I was not sure if this was limited to only home-lab environments?

In any case, I and others eventually stumbled onto this blog article by Sebastian Foss who I believe may have been the first to identify a workaround which was to simply disable the new AHCI Native Driver which loads by default and forcing it fall back to using the legacy AHCI driver which made the issue go away after a reboot. Although the folks who had reported seeing simliar issue were all using hardware platforms that were not officially on the VMware HCL, I decided to still file an internal bug and hoped someone could take a look to see what was going on.

With the release of ESXi 6.5 Update 1, I am happy to report the observed performance issues with the Native AHCI driver have now been resolved! I have been running on earlier release of ESXi 6.5 Update 1 build for couple of weeks now and have not seen any of the problems I had before. For those interested, the official fix went is in version 1.0.0-37vmw or greater of the vmw_ahci driver.

You can easily verify for this by running the following ESXCLI command to retrieve the version of your vmw_ahci driver:


If you had disabled the Native AHCI driver, you will definitely want to re-enable it. You can check if its been disabled by running the following ESXCLI command and checking the second column to see if it shows "false":

esxcli system module list | grep vmw_ahci

If the Native AHCI driver is disabled as shown in the previous command, then you can re-enable it by running the following ESXCLI command:

esxcli system module set --enabled=true --module=vmw_ahci

Once you have re-enabled the driver, you will need to reboot for the changes to go into effect.