ConnectX-3 SR-IOV on ESXi v6.7

[nezach]

Is that even possible? I installed ConnectX-3 on ESXi host, enabled SR-IOV in the firmware, but can't enable it in ESXi. Card is using driver nmlx4-core 3.17.9.12-1vmw.670.0.0.8169922

Found this thread SR-IOV in ESXi and vSphere 6.5 | Mellanox Interconnect Community where people say it is not possible.

 

[nezach]

To answer my own question. SR-IOV with ConnectX-3 can only be used with ESXi v6.0 or older.

With v6.0 VMware introduced the new "native" driver model. For ESXi v6.0 Mellanox had two drivers; the old vmklinux type MLNX-OFED driver (v2.4) that supported SR-IOV and the new "NATIVE ESXi Driver" using new driver model (v3.15) that did not support SR-IOV. With ESXi v6.5 MLNX-OFED driver support was dropped and now only the new native driver is available.

Native driver does not appear to be in active development for CX-3 cards since they require v3.17 of the driver and newer CX-4/CX-5 cards are using v4.17 as of ESXi v6.7.