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Updates to USB Network & NVMe Community Driver for ESXi 7.0 Update 3

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Happy Thursday! I know many of you have been asking about the status and support for ESXi 7.0 Update 3 and the popular USB Network Native Driver for ESXi. It has taken a bit longer as Songtao (the Engineer behind the Fling) has also been extremely busy and was also recently on PTO. Although I know this is something folks use extensively, I do also want to remind everyone that this is provided as a Fling, which means it is developed and supported as time permits. I will certainly do my best to help get new releases out aligning with ESXi updates and as a reminder, a new version of the USB Fling will ALWAYS be required for major releases of ESXi, which also includes update releases.

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USB Network Native Driver for ESXi Fling supports ESXi 7.0 Update 2

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Happy to share that our popular USB Network Native Driver for ESXi Fling has now been updated to v1.8 which primarily adds support for ESXi 7.0 Update 2!

This release also resolves a recent PSOD issue that a few folks in the community were hitting when using multiple USB NICs. For more details, please see the change log for more information.

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 😉