4. Pre-Installation Guidelines
NetXen, Inc.
Intelligent NIC Installation and Tuning Guide
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3
The VMware ESX 3.5 OS release contains two sets of NetXen drivers.
By default the ESX server will load the vmkernel version and allows virtual machines
to utilize the driver from the virtual switch.
There is also a VMware Linux console driver version that can be used by the CLI of
the ESX server that runs under the Linux 2.4 kernel.
Both drivers are version 3.4.115 by using the steps below you can utilize the VMware
Linux console driver for the NetXen card to update the firmware.
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How to check the NetXen NIC firmware version from VMware ESX Linux console.
Log onto the VMware Linux console by pressing ALT-F1 from that server and log onto
that system as root.
a) Locate the correct vmnic number by running:
ifconfig -a
Look for the 00:0E:1E that indicates this is a NetXen card's MAC address:
b) Run ethtool on this interface to get the details:
ethtool -i vmnic2
Example output below:
If the firmware version is earlier than 3.4.115, refer to the right column in
Table 6
for more information on the VMware firmware update procedure.
vmnic2 Link encap:Ethernet HWaddr 00:0E:1E:01:DD:37
UP BROADCAST RUNNING MULTICAST MTU:8000 Metric:1
RX packets:283654981 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 frame:0
TX packets:94696468 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 carrier:0
collisions:0 txqueuelen:1000
RX bytes:1310756904 (1250.0 Mb) TX bytes:1652504917 (1575.9 Mb)
Interrupt:121
driver: unm_nic
version: 3.4.115
firmware-version: 3.4.19 -- Check here for firmware version
bus-info: 0d:00.0