List of NICs and their equivalent OEM parts

[JanCerny]

What makes Intel that much more special? It doesn't do 25/40gig, not iWARP/RDMA...
I am not being sarcastic, I would genuinely love to know your thought process on this.

Good point. This card will be used for FreeNAS/TrueNAS and have expected driver support until 2028 (like others X710). I am using these Mellanox ConnectX-3 VPI cards for home 10Gbit networking (22 USD + 10 USD shipping + 21 % VAT/import charges).

I live in Czech Republic (EU), the prices are always much higher than in the US.

 

[newabc]

Ordered 2 NC552SFP cards. One for a QNAP box(based on this thread). Will try sr-iov on another.
Question: I am using Mikrotik as switch, will the DAC cable compatible with Mikrotik work for the HP cards?

This page shows it supports SR-IOV with proper firmware, software and OS.

Supports industry standard SR-IOV (Single Root Input Output Virtualization).
SR-IOV reduces CPU overhead when sharing networking resources between numerous virtual machines.
The NC552SFP hardware is capable of SR-IOV, requires firmware, software and OS support.

 

[samster88]

Please update this thread and OP's original recommendations to stay away from Dell's version of I350 cards as they don't support SR-IOV. They are equivalent to I340s. I bought 5 I350-T4(4x PCIE 0THGMP and 1x Daughter card R1XFC) and none of them support SR-IOV.

Dell I350-T4 = Regular I340-T4

Here is the forum post from Intel's website:

Sr-IOV Server 2012 I350-T4

I have a Dell 720 Server with a I350-T4 card installed with the latest drivers and firmware running Server 2012 with the HyperV role. I am having trouble creating a Virtual switch in HyperV that will show SR-IOV enabled. My main concern with the output below is that the CurrentCapabilities and...

forums.intel.com

 

[Geran]

Does anyone know the Supermicro i340-t4 product number?

 

[zack$]

AOC-SGP-i4

Edit: It's i350, don't think there is an i340

 

[Geran]

AOC-SGP-i4

Edit: It's i350, don't think there is an i340

Gotcha, thanks for your help though.

 

[larrysb]

Dell 0V5DG9 = Mellanox ConnectX-5 MCX512F, no suffix on the label, except with a Dell short bracket. No LED's. Dual port 25Gb EN, PCIe x16

Has a Dell OEM PSID.

Probably equivalent to MCX512F-ACAT.

Snagged a couple of pulls on the cheap, trying to figure out if I can tweek them into taking the standard Mellanox firmware.

 

[larrysb]

Dell 0V5DG9 = Mellanox ConnectX-5 MCX512F, no suffix on the label, except with a Dell short bracket. No LED's. Dual port 25Gb EN, PCIe x16

Has a Dell OEM PSID.

Probably equivalent to MCX512F-ACAT.

Snagged a couple of pulls on the cheap, trying to figure out if I can tweek them into taking the standard Mellanox firmware.

Been playing with one of them a little while waiting for tall brackets arrive from the Mellanox store. They do have LED's, tiny ones on the edge of the card, but no plastic light pipes. They do inter-operate just fine with 10gb ConnectX-3 EN cards and accept the same 10gb EN passive copper cables.

They are Dell OEM, and have a Dell PSID of something like 00000015. Meaning the only firmware update source is Dell, the Mellanox firmware won't load. No Linux package available, just Windows from Dell. But the .exe is just a self-extracting archive and easy to pull the .bin payload for the card. Just specify the source directory to the firmware file and Mellanox tools from OFED 5.0-1.0.0.0 package did a painless flash update.

Latest Dell Firmware is from January. It doesn't exactly match up with any of the Mellanox packages. Figured it would be a Dell blessed, re-release of a Mellanox package, but it appears to be a branch of stuff between MLNX releases.

ConnectX-5 is supported better by Nvidia deep-learning containers than ConnectX-3 for RDMA and so on. I'd like to play around with GPU Direct over RoCE between some Xeon workstations. Not sure whether I really need VPI/Infiniband for that, or if the EN cards will work.

But they were reasonable in price and I'll see what I can get out of them. If I can get them to do what I want, I might spring for the 25gbEN cable.

 

[Dazog]

Been playing with one of them a little while waiting for tall brackets arrive from the Mellanox store. They do have LED's, tiny ones on the edge of the card, but no plastic light pipes. They do inter-operate just fine with 10gb ConnectX-3 EN cards and accept the same 10gb EN passive copper cables.

They are Dell OEM, and have a Dell PSID of something like 00000015. Meaning the only firmware update source is Dell, the Mellanox firmware won't load. No Linux package available, just Windows from Dell. But the .exe is just a self-extracting archive and easy to pull the .bin payload for the card. Just specify the source directory to the firmware file and Mellanox tools from OFED 5.0-1.0.0.0 package did a painless flash update.

Latest Dell Firmware is from January. It doesn't exactly match up with any of the Mellanox packages. Figured it would be a Dell blessed, re-release of a Mellanox package, but it appears to be a branch of stuff between MLNX releases.

ConnectX-5 is supported better by Nvidia deep-learning containers than ConnectX-3 for RDMA and so on. I'd like to play around with GPU Direct over RoCE between some Xeon workstations. Not sure whether I really need VPI/Infiniband for that, or if the EN cards will work.

But they were reasonable in price and I'll see what I can get out of them. If I can get them to do what I want, I might spring for the 25gbEN cable.

Can you link me dell's site where you see this?

Also the connectx-5 firmware OEM (DELL)

Dell

Firmware, Drivers and Documentation for Mellanox Adapters and Switches for Dell EMC

www.mellanox.com

It won't work?

PSID: DEL0000000005

 

[larrysb]

This link worked for the 25gb ethernet cards I have:

Challenge Page

I downloaded the tools from Mellanox, and used 'mlxup' tool to flash them with the signed images in the "payload" folder from the download.
They appear to be working just fine and show up as bootable devices both in legacy BIOS and UEFI.

The tall brackets finally came in from Mellanox. They went on a long, extended multi-city tour of the western US courtesy of FedEx ground. I'm only using the 10gb passive enet cables from the Mellanox ConnectX-3 EN cards I had. They also interoperate nicely with them. But I haven't done much else with them yet.

 

[Dazog]

This link worked for the 25gb ethernet cards I have:

Challenge Page

I downloaded the tools from Mellanox, and used 'mlxup' tool to flash them with the signed images in the "payload" folder from the download.
They appear to be working just fine and show up as bootable devices both in legacy BIOS and UEFI.

The tall brackets finally came in from Mellanox. They went on a long, extended multi-city tour of the western US courtesy of FedEx ground. I'm only using the 10gb passive enet cables from the Mellanox ConnectX-3 EN cards I had. They also interoperate nicely with them. But I haven't done much else with them yet.

So the PID of these cards are DEL0000000005 or DEL0000000015 ?

 

[larrysb]

buncha-zeroes-15 as I recall.