Question 1

The card shipped to me wasn't an Intel PRO/1000, it was an IBM D56146-003, and is not recognized during the ESXi installation. Any suggestions?

Accepted Answer

What's the chipset of the card? According to this page from VMware, your card may not be supported out-of-the-box on a clean install. Mine is 82571EB which is deprecated. Link: http://kb.vmware.com/selfservice/microsites/search.do?language=en_US&cmd=displayKC&externalId=2056935

Question 2

So if I am putting this in a NAS build what exactly will this do for me?

Accepted Answer

These all assume your switch has the feature list to support these functions.  These are likely the most frequently used features.Jumbo Frames.  Up to 9238 bytes per packet.  More bits, less overhead with large transfers.  Switch and all connected adapters should support jumbo frames.  Frame size is negotiated to the lowest common denominator so if your desktop NIC doesn't support jumbo frames the best you'll get is 1500 bytes per packet.  Most desktop NICs, particularly RealTek do not support jumbo frames or only support 4k frames.  While this isn't a deal breaker the more common size is 9k which does make significantly more difference than 4k frames.  Either way, unless you're moving large files you're not likely to notice.  In my home lab the difference in throughput for a backup job is around 300Mbps for a 1500 byte frame vs. 800Mbps for a 9k frame.  The limit becomes how quickly my NAS can process the packets and write to disk.Link Aggregation (LAGG) - Load balancing traffic across multiple ports to increase available bandwidth.  YOUR SWITCH MUST SUPPORT LAGG.  If your switch does not support LAGG it will likely just shut both ports down.  Check for LACP support on your switch.  The average desktop switch does NOT support LACP.  Useful if multiple high demand endpoints are transferring large payloads at the same time. Distributed virtualization platforms often depend on having more bandwidth than a single NIC can handle.Redundancy. Either Active-Passive or Active-Active redundancy.  Similar to LAGG, this feature must be supported by your switch since the MAC address is usually leveraged to provide seamless transition from the active to fail-over NIC in the event of a failure.

Question 3

Does this come with the low profile adapter for 2U rackmount cases?

Accepted Answer

Just to add to the confusion, mine did not come with a low profile adapter. So don't bet on it.

Question 4

Will this work in desktop class hardware that is being used for and ESXi test lab?

Accepted Answer

I am currently using 9 of these across 3 HP DL380 G7/G8 servers running vSphere 5.1. These should work fine for an ESXi lab.

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Intel PRO/1000 Pt Dual Port Server Adapter

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