RDMA in ESXi 6.7 on ConnectX-2 Cards

[Alexander Young]

We have a series of 13 Dell R610 hosts with ConnectX-2 EN cards running ESXi 6.7. We have been trying to get RDMA (more importantly the iSER adapter) to enable and show up, however we have been unsuccessful. RDMA is supported by the FW, as we had gotten it to show up before with different drivers, but we generally try not to install unofficial drivers, as we have had stability issues in the past.

The driver version currently installed is: 1.9.7.0 (Dec-03-2012)
These are Mellanox ConnectX-2 EN cards with 2.10.720 fw.
The build of ESXi is 11675023 6.7.0 Update 1, attached to vCenter 6.7 on Windows Server 2012.

 

[mmo]

ConnectX-2 is not supported in ESXi 6.7/6.7U1 anymore.

http://www.mellanox.com/page/products_dyn?product_family=29

 

[Alexander Young]

Would there be any unofficial way to get it to work? Talking with our hardware director, we can try a unofficial way if it would work. They drivers we tried before were a bit flaky.

 

[fishtacos]

My research indicates that there is no way to support ESXi 6+ with CX2 and RDMA. I have had luck with firmware flashing and passing through the CX2 cards in Windows Server 2012 with RDMA support, but YMMV. It's simply a matter of old drivers not being compatible with the new ESXi versions.

 

[Alexander Young]

Alright, I was afraid of that. Thank You for confirming my suspicions. I guess we will have to just upgrade to ConnectX-3's or later.