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Sonnet Solo5G Multi-Gig (1G/2.5G/5G) USB Adapter works with ESXi

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Last week I caught this tweet from Blake Garner who is an active VMware Community member that I follow and I came to learn that Sonnet just launched their first Multi-Gigabit (1GbE, 2.5GbE & 5GbE) USB Network Adapter called the Solo5G.

This of course piqued my interest for VMware Homelabs as last year we had just enabled the first Multi-Gigabit USB Network Adapter from QNAP supporting ESXi using the popular USB Native Driver Fling for ESXi. The QNAP device uses an Aquantia chipset and I had a funny suspicion that the Sonnet device might be using either the exact same or simliar chipset.

To confirm my theory, I reached out to the folks over at Sonnet and they were kind enough to send me a unit for validation which just arrived earlier this week. I had an Intel NUC 10 (Frost Canyon) already running and I just plugged it in and to my surprise it worked immediately since it already had the USB Native Driver Fling installed.


So there you have it, same chipset as the QNAP and best of all this device is only $79.99 USD which be purchased directly from Sonnet here. As of writing this blog post, the Solo5G is much cheaper than the QNAP. In fact, it seems the price of the QNAP has significantly increased since I had first blogged about it. I think multi-gig NICs both USB-based but also PCIe and respective switches is starting to become more mainstream, at least in the consumer markets and this is certainly an easy way to add additional bandwidth without breaking the bank. Big thanks to the folks at Sonnet and Blake for sharing the news!

ESXi on 10th Gen Intel NUC (Frost Canyon)

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Just a heads up, if you are considering the latest 10th Generation of the Intel NUC (formally known as Frost Canyon) which are now available on Amazon, Newegg & SimplyNUC, there is an issue to be aware of. The onboard Intel NIC is not detected by ESXi which prevents the installer from proceeding. This issue was reported by a fellow reader named Ben who reached out to me over the holiday and with his help, I was able to get access to the system. It looks like the these NUCs have a newer version of I219-V NIC which is currently not recognized by either the vmklinux e1000 or ne1000 driver.

UPDATE (08/21/20) - To disable the TPM 2.0 connection cannot be established message in ESXi, please see this blog post for more details.

UPDATE (01/20/20) - As shared on Twitter last Friday, we now have an updated ne1000 driver that will detect the Intel NIC found in the new 10th Gen NUC. You will need to replace the existing ne1000 driver with the new offline bundle, which can be downloaded from here. I would like to remind folks that the Intel NUC is not an officially supported platform from VMware and although have have enable this new system for the community, it does not mean this system or previous generations are supported.

There are two options to author a new ESXi Image Profile containing the ne1000 driver, the easiest method is if you have an existing vCenter Server and using the vSphere H5 Client and Image Builder UI. For more details, please take a look at this blog post for detailed instructions.

USB Native Driver Fling for ESXi adds support for Multi-Gig (1G/2.5G/5G) Adapter

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Today, we have an exciting update to give on our USB Network Native Driver for ESXi Fling which has had two updates since releasing earlier this year and has been extremely well received by the VMware community. As many of you know, I am always on the look out for new and innovative tech that can help enable our customers, especially when it comes to building home labs to learn about the latest and greatest VMware software.

UPDATE (06/08/20) - QNAP has just published the updated firmware for their QNA-UC5G1T USB NIC which resolves some of the performance issue observed with the initial release.

Several months back, I came to learn about a really cool USB-based Multi-Gigabit Network Adapter (QNA-UC5G1T) from QNAP which can negotiate with speeds up to 1Gbps, 2.5Gbps and 5Gbps. I was not familiar with the multi-gig specification but it it looks like it was created as a standard back in 2016 as IEEE 802.3bz. This initially evolved from advancements in wireless technology but more recently it started to make its way into ethernet-based devices.

Although this particular device is from QNAP, the underlying chipset is actually from Aquantia, now part of Marvell. If the name sounds familiar, it should as Aquantia is also the vendor to Apple for their 10GbE NICs in both the 2018 Mac Mini and new iMac Pros. In fact, their chipsets are also used in a number of Thunderbolt 3 to 10GbE NICs which also works with ESXi. Access to 10GbE is certainly more common these days but it certainly is not for everyone and not all platforms can be expanded to support it.


The QNA-UC5G1T device is not only small but because it is USB-based, you are more likely to have spare USB ports on your system than say a traditional PCIe slot or Thunderbolt 3 port. From a cost standpoint, this device is about half the cost of the 10GbE Thunderbolt adapter coming in at $79 USD and can be ordered from Amazon. As far as I know, QNAP is the only vendor who has produced a multi-gig USB adapter, but perhaps in the future, there will be other vendors.

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New hardware support & enhancements to USB Network Native Driver for ESXi

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Since releasing the USB Network Native Driver for ESXi Fling back in February, the feedback and support for this Fling has simply been amazing. I especially enjoy hearing from customers, almost on a weekly basis, on how they are taking advantage of this solution in their vSphere/vSAN/NSX home lab and enabling for more complex networking topologies.

When we released the fling, we had focused on the most popular USB 3.0 network adaptors that we had accessed to which were based on AX8817a, AX88179 & RTL8153 chipsets. The initial list started out with just 5 devices, but we knew there were going to be others. In fact, Songtao and I have received plenty of feedback from our customers on what they would like to see supported, including USB 2.0 network adaptors. Another highly requested feature that customers have been asking for is support for Jumbo Frames and this is usually in the context of setting up either an NSX-V or NSX-T environment.

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ESXi Native Driver for USB NIC Fling

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Today, I am very excited to announce a new Fling that I have been working on which is a Native Driver for ESXi that will enable support for three of the most popular USB network adapter chipsets found in the market today. The ASIX USB 2.0 gigabit network ASIX88178a, ASIX USB 3.0 gigabit network ASIX88179 & the Realtek USB 3.0 gigabit network RTL8153. This effort had initially started back in 2016 as a side project with Songtao, a VMware Engineer who works on our USB stack for ESXi. Based on the enormous amount of feedback from the community as well customer Production use cases, this side project evolved into the development of a full fledge Native Driver for ESXi.

This Fling is more than just adding additional network interfaces for vSphere Home Labs, which is definitely a use case, but it is also about enabling new and future computing platforms that may not always have the traditional network connectivity that we have come to expect. Today, ESXi supports a number of high-end network controllers (10G/40G/100G) designed for Enterprise Data Centers that include advanced networking & low latency features. As more & more workloads appear at the Edge like IoT, point-of-sales & remote office use cases, the traditional networking solutions may no longer meet the needs of these new infrastructures.

For Edge computing environments, reducing the cost & power consumption is definitely one of the driving factors. However, with some of these platforms, their form factors can make it difficult or impossible to support traditional high-end network controllers. Luckily, there are a number of options for network adapters in the market but is can also be difficult to support them all.

USB has become one the most widely adopted connection type in the world & USB network adapters are also popular amongst Edge computing platforms. In some platforms, there is either limited or no PCI/PCIe slots for I/O expansion & in some cases, an Ethernet port is not even available. This Fling will hopefully help enable some of these Edge use cases today and with the help of the community and feedback, we can see how this can be enhanced or evolved over time including where it could even be part of the ESXi distribution.

Another use case for USB-based network adapters as mentioned earlier are for vSphere Home Labs, platforms like the Intel NUC or Apple Mac Mini have limited number of built-in Ethernet ports, but plenty of USB & USB-C ports which can enable these platforms with additional networking capabilities. These systems could also be potential Edge platform candidates given the right connectivity.

For download and instructions, please visit https://labs.vmware.com/flings/usb-network-native-driver-for-esxi

Functional USB-C Ethernet Adapter for ESXi 5.5, 6.0 & 6.5

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While attending an offsite this week, there were some discussions amongst my colleagues about their new Apple Mac Pro and its USB-C only ports. The discussion was completely unrelated to work, however that did get me thinking about the USB-C peripheral market and specifically their ethernet adapters. While searching online, I came across several new USB-C to gigabit ethernet adapters that were now available and one in particular that was very interesting, was the Plugable USB-C to 10/100/1000 Gigabit Ethernet LAN Network Adapter. What caught my eye about this specific network adapter was that it uses the exact same ASIX AX88179 driver as my USB 3.0 to Ethernet Adapter ESXi VIBs were built off of! There was a good chance this might just work.


As you can probably guess, I was pretty excited and quickly ordered one of the Plugable USB-C Ethernet Adapters. The next challenge was getting access to a system that has a USB-C port. After asking around, I finally got my hands on a Dell XPS 13 which has a USB-C port that I could use for a few days. Funny enough, the Dell laptop only has USB 3.0 and USB-C ports, so the first challenge was to disable Secure Boot since I had built a custom ESXi 6.5 image that included my USB 3.0 Ethernet Adapter VIB. Below are the ESXi VIBs or offline bundles that will be required for this solution.

UPDATE (02/12/19) - A new VMware Native Driver for USB-based NICs has just been released, please use this driver going forward.

Please see this blog post for more detailed instructions on installing the VIB as well as accessing the vusbX pNIC.

Disclaimer: This is not officially supported by VMware. Use at your own risk.

Once I got ESXi up and running, I was disappointed to see that the USB-C device was not being detected. I had tried a few more things but nothing worked and I decided to sleep on it. The next morning, I realize maybe there was some additional settings that needed to be tweaked in the BIOS. With a bit of trial/error, I found out that you needed to enable the "Thunderbolt Boot Support" which apparently is disabled by default, at least on this Dell system. Below is a screenshot of the BIOS USB/Thunderbolt Settings and this was the only change required from the system defaults.


Once I rebooted, I immediately saw the link up on the USB-C device while ESXi was starting up 😀

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