vSphere 7.0 – Page 18

Quick Tip - ESXi 7.0 Update 3f now includes all Intel I219 devices from Community Networking Driver Fling

07.18.2022 by William Lam // Leave a Comment

Thanks to Reuben F who left a comment on the Community Networking Driver for ESXi Fling asking about something interesting he saw in the latest ESXi 7.0 Update 3f release notes regarding Intel ne1000 driver.

ESXi 7.0 Update 3f upgrades the Intel-ne1000 driver to support Intel I219-LM devices that are required for newer server models, such as the Intel Rocket Lake-S platform. The TCP segmentation offload for the I219 devices is deactivated because of known issues in the hardware DMA.

He asked whether the Community Networking Driver for ESXi Fling was still needed to support the various Intel I219 devices on the Fling requirements page?

First off, thank you Reuben for making me aware of this, which I totally missed while reading the release notes. Secondly, I reached out to Songtao, one of the Engineers on Fling and he was also surprised by the news. He checked the source and then confirmed that all listed Intel I219 devices in the Fling has actually been incorporated into the latest ESXi 7.0 Update 3f release and the Fling would no longer be required for these specific devices and we have Shu, another Engineer on the Fling to thank for this awesome update! Thank you Shu!

Songtao, Shu and myself had released the Community Networking Driver for ESXi Fling back in early 2021 to help support some of the networking devices that we had observed in the community and there have been a number of releases that has added additional devices. It is always a great feeling to see your work not only being well adopted but also now productized. This is one of the many benefits of the VMware Fling's program and being able to share a solution that solves an immediate problem and iterating on feedback from our users, we have the opportunity to enhance and improve our products/services. Thank you to all the VMware customers who have and continue to support us! 🙏

Who knows ... maybe the network devices under the igc-community module in the Fling will be productized next? 😀

Quick Tip - Avoid network conflicts with Docker Bridge Network on the vCenter Cloud Gateway for vSphere+/vSAN+

07.12.2022 by William Lam // Leave a Comment

The new vSphere+/vSAN+ cloud service is now generally available for all customers! For those interested, I recently wrote about my first experience using the new vSphere+vSAN+ service with my vSphere Homelab environment, which I will also be updating based on the generally available service.

In addition to the resources above and in the VMC Cloud Console, here is a link to the official vSphere+/vSAN+ documentation including pre-req.

During my initial deployment of the vCenter Cloud Gateway (VCGW) used by the vSphere+/vSAN+ service, I did not run into any issues but upon deploying my second VCGW for a different environment, I ran into some networking issues. After a bit of debugging, I came to learn that the VCGW application and services are composed of various Docker containers and there was a network conflict with the default Docker Bridge Network that the VCGW has been configured by default with.

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