iSCSI + MPIO + ESXi6

[larryexchange]

Mellanox already have a NON-BETA driver for Windows 2016, you have to ignore the beta page, go directly to the download page.

http://www.mellanox.com/page/products_dyn?product_family=32&mtag=windows_driver

The cards that you linked is not IB card, it is EN ethernet card. You will not be using IB protocol.

With the latest firmware, even the older ConnectX-2 cards would do RDMA over ROCE on top of Windows 2016.
I setup a low power 2 nodes Windows 2016 HA Storage Space Direct cluster last week with a pair of the older Mellanox ConnectX-2 EN card as cluster interconnect network...

Can you elaborate it little bit more how you make SMB Direct (RDMA) works with ConnectX-2 on Windows Server 2016 Storage Space Direct?

I have C6220II. Each node has a dual-port connectx-2 NIC. I upgraded to the latest firmware 2.9.1000 and install the VPI_WinOF-5_35. I managed to change the port from IB to ETH but I just could not get RDMA works. I have another group of servers which have ConnectX-3. There is no problem with them at all.

I search Mellanox website and found according to official document http://www.mellanox.com/pdf/whitepapers/WP_Deploying_Windows_Server_Eth.pdf, seems ConnectX-2 doesn't support SMB direct, even in 2012 R2.