Mellanox ConnectX EN 10Gig MNPH29B-XTC OS Compatibility

[Nirvash]

I had picked up a couple of dual port cards to dabble in 10gig networking and on trying to install one into my file server ( napp-it on Open Indiana ) I had realized that I may of horribly misread the supported OS's for the card.
So, am I an incredible idiot and bought a card that doesn't support the OS I need, or am I just missing something.
And if I did, what 10Gbe cards should I look for?

 

[gea]

Use Intel all the way
ex Intel X540 (singleport T1 or dualport T2) paired with a Netgear switch XS 708 if you can use copper.

 

[Nirvash]

Ah, well there is quite the price difference between intel cards and other brands, but I guess that is the price you pay for compatibility.

 

[gea]

The price difference is not with new and regular parts.
But you may use them in clients or build a napp-in-one system where you may find drivers for ESXi

 

[Jeggs101]

These cards are so cheap! $59 OBO: Mellanox Connectx En 10GIGABIT 2 Port Ethernet Adapter PCI E MNPH29B XTC Card | eBay

Did you try them just with OpenIndiana? I would love to hear if they worked with ESXi or Hyper-V.

 

[PigLover]

Those are older Connect-X 1 EN cards (Ethernet only). They work OK in Windows/Windows server after you load the old drivers. You get get them to work in Linux but you have to add a line to /etc/modules to load it because the current Mellanox drivers don't recognize it properly.

Can't speak for using it under openSolaris derived systems like OpenIndiana. Likely works great if you can find the driver.

They perform OK, but they do limited on-board stack processing so they can load your CPU compared to more modern cards. No problems under moderate SOHO loads but if you have a heavily loaded server they could be a issue.

I just sold half-dozen of them after replacing them with Connect-X 3 versions (I wanted to play with RDMA over Ethernet).

 

[Nirvash]

These cards are so cheap! $59 OBO: Mellanox Connectx En 10GIGABIT 2 Port Ethernet Adapter PCI E MNPH29B XTC Card | eBay

Did you try them just with OpenIndiana? I would love to hear if they worked with ESXi or Hyper-V.

Just so you know, that same guy took my offer for 45$ each on those and I will throw one into my ESXi box and see if I can get it working.

Those are older Connect-X 1 EN cards (Ethernet only). They work OK in Windows/Windows server after you load the old drivers. You get get them to work in Linux but you have to add a line to /etc/modules to load it because the current Mellanox drivers don't recognize it properly.

Can't speak for using it under openSolaris derived systems like OpenIndiana. Likely works great if you can find the driver.

They perform OK, but they do limited on-board stack processing so they can load your CPU compared to more modern cards. No problems under moderate SOHO loads but if you have a heavily loaded server they could be a issue.

I just sold half-dozen of them after replacing them with Connect-X 3 versions (I wanted to play with RDMA over Ethernet).

Thanks for the info PigLover, do you have an example of what needs to be done to get them working in linux? And yea, as far as I have found out, this card doesn't seem to have much of any Solaris driver.

 

[PigLover]

I'll have to look to see if I took notes on the exact module name to load. I fear that I may not have...

I had them working until Centos 5.x, Debian Wheezy (proxmox, so Wheezy with older kernel) and Fedora. Memory is fuzzy, but as I recall with some distro's you had to complile/load the driver and others it was already there. In all cases, though, the boot probes see the card as a Mellanox card and load the newer VPI driver that is now a standard part of most Linux distros. VPI won't support this card and its presence will prevent the right one from loading automatically - so you have to cause the older Mellanox EN driver to load before VPI and all is well. This is done by just naming the right driver in /etc/modules...unfortunately, I don't think I can remember the module name

 

[burr]

That same seller took my offer of $40 each last week. I did find that to get them to work with ESXI 5.5 or 5.1 you have to disable VT-D in the bios.

 

[Jeggs101]

That same seller took my offer of $40 each last week. I did find that to get them to work with ESXI 5.5 or 5.1 you have to disable VT-D in the bios.

That is not a deal killer for me since I am not going to try passing thru a RAID controller. Was the ESXi 5.5 hard other than the VT-d part? How is performance with the data transfers?

 

[burr]

i'm still in the process of getting it all setup. 5.5 wasn't hard at all. I hope to be able to really test performance in the next couple of days.

 

[T_Minus]

@Nirvash did you get the MNPH29B-XTC Card working? I just got 3 for dirt and would like to connect them all together.

 

[Marsh]

I purchased about 30 of the MNPH29C from the same seller in year 2014.
Update the firmware first, some of the cards had really old firmware.
Plug the cards into the system, Windows 2012r2 and ESXi 5.5 would just recognized it as 10gb network card.

 

[T_Minus]

Great to hear, planning to use with ESXI 5.5 systems!

 

[Marsh]

Looking at my old notes,
For windows 2012r2, I did installed
MLNX_VPI_WinOF-4_60_All_win2012R2_x64.exe

This is my batch file to update MNPH29B-XTR firmware

REM MNPH29B-XTR
mst status
echo Looking for mt26448_pci_cr0
pause

call "C:\Program Files\Mellanox\WinMFT\flint" -d mt26448_pci_cr0 -i fw-ConnectX2-rel-2_9_1200-MNPH29C-XTR_A2-A5-FlexBoot-3.3.400.bin burn

call "C:\Program Files\Mellanox\WinMFT\flint" -d mt26448_pci_cr0 -i fw-25408-2_9_1000-MNPH29B-XTC_A1-A2.bin burn

pause