Good 10GbE card for vSAN + "blades"?

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AveryFreeman

consummate homelabber
Mar 17, 2017
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Near Seattle
averyfreeman.com
Hey,

I have a number of micro PCs I am planning to run off 10GbE cards for storage

I see in HCL there are a few options like marvel, Broadcom, Chelsio that are supported in 7.0+ but do some of them suck? I have heard Broadcom and Marvel chips have bad reputations, have they improved over the last few years? What about support for RDMA or NVME-OF?

There's only one I see that's x4 and it's an Aqtion AQ-100 which I think is Aquantia (Marvel) that doesn't exactly give me the warm fuzzies so I'd probably be running x8 cards in x4 slot with gap (risers for M.2 NVMe slot)

Suggestions? Was going to run presumably iscsi off vSAN "proper" server for micro PC "blades" but if NVMe-of an option would like to explore that (not quite sure how that works, have only seen option for iSER in vCenter - is NVMe-of under storage instead of network?)

Thanks