If they work its a great deal, half what a good price is for pulls, theres been some talk about them on pfsense forums.I've been thinking about ordering one of these:
Winyao WYI350-T4 PCIe X4
Either through dealextreme or a taobao broker. Appears to be a 4-port intel i350 with full and low height brackets for under $100.
Best I ever managed was $150/ea shipped BO and that was probably offer attempt #30 to seller #20. Last I looked at completed listings $200+ sells nearly every time.I got my Sun i350 quad-ports for just a little more than that a while back. They're fully supported in ESXi 5.1 and 5.5.
Having a passed through NIC means that VM can't be migrated.hagak: why would you avoid passthrough? (just wondering the thought process here?)
I can see a use for it with badly supported OS's like BSD. Paravirtual adapters have been known to work like chit over there.As stated reason for not passing through is you defeat one main point of a VM and that is hardware isolation. In particular there is very little reason to passthru a nic, sure a SAS controller for a SAN type VM makes sense since that VM needs specific control to do its job. But very few applications require hardware level control over the NIC. You can still get network isolation within your vswitch configuration without needing to passthrough the nic if that is a concern.