I know this is offtopic but a personal note for folks:
1. Intel nic's rule - easy to use - no driver b/s - expensive.
2. Emulex BE2/BE3 nic's rule - vcenter plugin, single firmware, 7 and 2008 drivers (many nic's do not have 7 support) - unified driver for two generations (or more). cheap for the older BE2 models. single UEFI flash that can be used in esxi/windows/dos for all components.
3. broadcom - serious PITA avoid! unless you like 5 flash files that take 5-20 minutes to complete or fail.
4. netxen - avoid! driver slipstream design (some o/s use the bios from the driver not the firmware)
5. qlogic - not so bad but netxen avoid! 8152 runs only at x4 pci-e 2.0
6. brocade - requires brocade sfp/active dac - avoid!
DBA: Would you care to suggest which Mellanox cards are best suited for ease of us and cross operating system (drivers)? I'd love to try some but don't want to step into a windows 7/2012/esxi 5.1 firmware/driver mess.
Need esxi 5.1 support mainly. (including flashing,configuring)
For 10GbE cards, I agree that Intel is an excellent choice, price aside. If price is an issue, I like the eBay $65-100 Mellanox VPI cards placed into 10GbE mode. My favorite, however, remains 40Gbit Infiniband: cheap, dramatically faster than 10GbE and, with IPoIB plus RDMA and a switch with a built-in subnet manager, very easy. I do admit, however, that I have not yet dived into the deep details of virtual networking with any of these cards; So far I'm getting more Hyper-V networking performance than I need with just the basic settings and I don't do that much with esxi, if only for pricing reasons.
To partially answer your other question mrkrad: The Mellanox landscape is quite easy. All ConnectX-2 and ConnectX-3 VPI cards have been flawless in my testing on Windows, Hyper-V and Solaris. The caveat is that I have not tried esxi using these cards.
Mellanox has a unified driver for all cards, just like LSI, so driver installs are easy. If you are on Linux/Unix then the installers will happily update the firmware during the driver install, which is nice, but on Windows, at least with the ConnectX-2 cards, you'll likely need to update the firmware yourself. All OEM cards require that the OEM release their own firmware update - or you can
do it for them. I can't blame Mellanox for not providing OEM installers, but one might speculate that the ConnectX-2 Windows firmware troubles are a way to encouraging users to buy the newer ConnectX-3 cards.
We've covered it before, but it bears repeating: The fast+cheap networking deal of the century are the Mellanox ConnectX-2 VPI cards. Buy one on eBay for around $100 (sometimes much less for a DDR card), build yourself some
custom firmware to get RDMA, and then enjoy up to 32Gbit IP over IB with up to 3,200MB/s SMB3 transfer speeds and 250K IOPS. If you have a small number of machines, you may even be able to enjoy these speeds without the cost of an IB switch by using a point-to-point architecture - which of course is exactly what the original author of this topic is trying to do. He asked for help with 10GbE but I proposed IPoIB instead and he's giving it a try. If he ever wants to switch to 10GbE, he has VPI cards so it's just a software switch-over.
