48
83840-546-00 N
7
VMware Driver Software
This chapter provides the following information for the VMware driver software:
“Download, Install, and Update Drivers” on page 49
“Driver Parameters” on page 53
For information about installing and using the VMware utility (vCenter Plug-in) to
manage adapters, see the
User’s Guide: QConvergeConsole Plug-ins for
vSphere
(part number SN0054677-00).
VMware Drivers
lists the 8400/3400 Series VMware drivers.
Table 7-1. FastLinQ 8400/3400 Series VMware Drivers
VMware
Driver
Description
bnx2x
VMware driver for the 8400/3400 Series 10Gb network adapters. This
driver manages all PCI device resources (registers, host interface
queues) and also acts as the layer 2 VMware low-level network driver for
FastLinQ 8400/3400 Series 10G adapters. This driver directly controls
the hardware and is responsible for sending and receiving Ethernet
packets on behalf of the VMware host networking stack. The bnx2x
driver also receives and processes device interrupts, both on behalf of
itself (for L2 networking) and on behalf of the bnx2fc (FCoE protocol) and
C-NIC drivers.
cnic
This driver provides the interface between Cavium’s upper layer protocol
(storage) drivers and the FastLinQ 8400/3400 Series 10Gb network
adapters. The converged network interface controller (C-NIC) module
works with the bnx2 and bnx2x network drivers in the downstream, and
the bnx2fc (FCoE) and bnx2i (iSCSI) drivers in the upstream.
