Inexpensive 40G NIC for VMWare home lab?

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Ron Kelley

New Member
Jan 13, 2020
15
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Greetings all,

Looking for pair of inexpensive 40GbE NICs for my VMWare home lab (2x servers running 6.5u3). The servers currently have dual-port 10G NICs, and I would like to bump them to 40G. I already have 40G DACs from a previous setup. This will be pure Ethernet - no InfiniBand.

I saw this from a recent thread:

649281-B21 656089-001 661685-001 HPE IB FDR/EN 10/40GB 2P 544QSFP ADAPTER | eBay

With a conversion guide here:
https://forums.servethehome.com/ind...net-dual-port-qsfp-adapter.20525/#post-198015


Currently, these cards are $29/ea on eBay, but I don't know anything about them (VMware compatibility, software/firmware versions, etc). Can someone please let me know if they will work w/VMWare once flashed?

Thank you.
 
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sash

Member
Nov 22, 2019
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They work just fine. I just installed one into one of my hosts. I'm running latest release of vCenter and ESXi though. Support was out of the box Screenshot 2020-01-13 at 23.07.30.png
 

Ron Kelley

New Member
Jan 13, 2020
15
5
3
They work just fine. I just installed one into one of my hosts. I'm running latest release of vCenter and ESXi though. Support was out of the box View attachment 12777
Thanks for the reply! I see the seller is out of town until Jan 20, but I found a similar card here using Rev: A5

649281-B21 656089-001 661685-001 HPE IB FDR/EN 10/40GB 2P 544QSFP ADAPTER | eBay

Do you know if this is the same card as in the other eBay link? They appear to be the same to me but I would like a second pair of eyes.
 

sash

Member
Nov 22, 2019
44
8
8
Thanks for the reply! I see the seller is out of town until Jan 20, but I found a similar card here using Rev: A5

649281-B21 656089-001 661685-001 HPE IB FDR/EN 10/40GB 2P 544QSFP ADAPTER | eBay

Do you know if this is the same card as in the other eBay link? They appear to be the same to me but I would like a second pair of eyes.
I bought from this seller as well a couple of days back precisely for the same reason)
Mine is going overseas. So it will be a couple of weeks before I get it.
 

sash

Member
Nov 22, 2019
44
8
8
I've checked my current card from the seller that is away at the moment. It is revision A2.
Screenshot 2020-01-14 at 14.57.21.png
 

Ron Kelley

New Member
Jan 13, 2020
15
5
3
Thanks. I ordered 2 cards from the second seller for $25/ea last night ($50 total - free shipping inside the US). According to the pics on eBay, these should be revision A5 cards.

The cards should arrive by Friday/Saturday this week, and I will update this post when I have a chance to apply the Mellanox firmware.

Thanks for the great feedback so far!
 

Ron Kelley

New Member
Jan 13, 2020
15
5
3
Follow-up on this thread. As per the previous post, I ordered 2x dual-port 40G NICs from eBay on Tuesday, and the cards arrived yesterday. Both in factory wrapped anti-static bags with rev A5 stickers. I installed one in my Debian server, followed the conversion guide mentioned in the first post, and had the new firmware installed/running in about 15mins! The second card only took about 10mins to configure.

To verify network connectivity, I used a 100G DAC cable and connected the ports in a back-to-back config (Port-1 to Port-2). iPerf showed 4986MBytes/sec. Excellent!!!

screenshot_07.png

Finally, I popped these into my ESXi 6.5U3 servers, configured the network, attached some VMs to the NICs, and ran some speed tests. Again, these cards pushed over 4GB/sec between VMs (across two servers).

Many thanks to this forum for the great instructions and suggestions. Also, kudos to the eBay seller - very prompt updates and fast shipping.