Proxmox Dual 10Gb SFP+ Cards - for fibre connections

[frankle]

So I've used several Dell/Intel X520-DA2 cards with SFP+ DAC cables in my ESXi servers and QNAP iSCSI NAS units for several years. They're priced really well and just work fine ... till you want to move to fibre connections!

After moving my test rig to Proxmox, installing some of the X520-DA2 cards and getting the well priced SFP-10G-SR Transceiver's from FS.com, and some fibre cables to go with them, I started down a rabbit hole of making it all work with "non-genuine" transceivers!

I eventually got them working, showing up in Proxmox 7 and "flipping the correct bit" to enable 3rd party transceivers ... but there must be an easier way to do it.

So in short, what is the dual port 10Gbe SFP+ network card that works OTB with Proxmox and cheaper transceivers? Dual port is enough for me to work with ... Point me in the right direction please!

 

[RTM]

With Proxmox it should not be necessary to modify the EEPROM to make X520's support non "Intel" transceivers.
It is probably easier to add the allow_unsupported_sfp flag, as this guide describes, though of course it is not quite plug and play.

Since you asked for NICs that don't require specific transceivers, I believe that Mellanox cards (like the connectx-3, that is cheap, popular but also end of life) do not do any of that.
But as with most NICs (X520 is really more of a statistical outlier - I am not aware that there's even firmware updates for it, at least ignoring option ROM stuff) it is recommended that you update the firmware, and is it then really plug and play?