Cheap Dual Port Intel NIC for ESXi

nhan.ng

Just give you guys a head up, I bought 6 of these and they all work fine with ESXi 4.1 in a regular PCI slot. Just watch out for clearance on the southbridge/northbridge heatsinks on your motherboard Looks like i have to trim mine before I can populate all 2 PCI slots

-So far I have 1 in my Openfiler server, wanted 2 but southbridge heatsink got in the way.
-My 2 ESXi systems, i was able to get 1 into the Biostar mobo and 2 in the Asrock mobo.

It's a low profile card but it does not come with a low profile bracket btw.

http://www.txcesssurplus.com/servlet/the-1534/Dell-J1679-Intel-Pro-fdsh-1000/Detail

jibbajabba

You say Openfiler so you probably use iSCSI - bear in mind that those cheap cards don't have any feature sets such as TCP-IP Offload engines etc., so you may see performance problems (been there, done that, bought the t-shirt - or in that case, better cards)

nhan.ng

IPv6 is not supported, but IPv4 is there.

jibbajabba

Fair 'nuff .... just think there is a reason for it to be cheap :P

nhan.ng

It's an old PCI-X card, and I bet most companies are off loading them to get newer, better, faster cards. This store must have alot of them to explain why they sell them for so cheap. Like 4 of my cards still have ID labels on them

jibbajabba

My card of choice, for most ESX hosts, are the Intel ET cards, rock solid .. But certainly slightly more expensive than $15

Intel Gigabit ET Quad Port - Overview

(they're probably near $200 for the Dual port depending on the supplier)

JDMurray

Those cards are cheap because they are pulls from pre-owned equipment. They come with a 30-day return policy, but nothing past that.

Fugazi1000

nhan.ng wrote: »

IPv6 is not supported, but IPv4 is there.

Checksum offload is not the only type of offload. As good a find (cheap) as they are, you may still have performance issues with iSCSI as Gomjaba suggests depending upon workload.

MentholMoose

These are not low-performance budget cards. The Intel PRO/1000 MT was top of the line a few years ago, and cost $200+ when new. They aren't quite as good as the latest cards, but are still usable. Anything PCI-X is cheap nowadays since it is being replaced by PCIe, plus they're used as JDMurray points out.

jibbajabba

MentholMoose wrote: »

These are not low-performance budget cards. The Intel PRO/1000 MT was top of the line a few years ago, and cost $200+ when new. They aren't quite as good as the latest cards, but are still usable. Anything PCI-X is cheap nowadays since it is being replaced by PCIe, plus they're used as JDMurray points out.

Another important point for NIC used for virtual infrastructes : VMDQ, which the MT lacks of.

VMDQ wrote:

Off loads the data sorting functionality from the Hypervisor to the network silicon, thereby improving data throughput and CPU usage

The MT adapter was initially a desktop adapter.

I don't want to say they are bad .. just saying you get what you pay for ...

nhan.ng

it's a cheap card for lab/personal use. It's not intended to use in a production environment. You can always move up to a higher/more expensive card later on

msteinhilber

Glad I came across this post, I was about to invest in a handful of the cheapo $35 PCI-E single port Intel nic's for a couple ESXi boxes I setup to study up for the exam coming up.

nhan.ng

you're welcome