Last spring, VMware and Aquantia (now part of Marvell) collaborated and delivered their first ESXi Native Driver for their AQtion (Atlantic) based 10GbE network adapters. This new driver was primarily focused on enabling network connectivity for ESXi when running on either an Apple 2018 Mac Mini (8,1) and Apple 2019 Mac Pro (7,1) that included the 10GbE networking option. Consequently, this driver also benefited the broader VMware Community as it enabled additional 10GbE networking through a number of Thunderbolt 3 to 10GbE network adapters that customers could now take advantage in their VMware environments.

With all these benefits, VMware has decided to inbox the Aquantia/Marvell driver with the latest ESXi 7.0 Update 2 release, so that customers no longer had to create a custom ESXi Image Profile that included the driver, which was always required when installing ESXi on either the Apple Mac Mini or Mac Pro that were configured with the 10GbE networking option. For a complete list of supported Aquantia/Marvell AQtion based network adapters, please see the VMware HCL.

Here is a screenshot of an earlier release of ESXi 7.0 Update 2 running on the 2018 Mac Mini which now automatically recognizes the 10GbE network adapter out of the box.