Check Firmware and drivers of Network card on a VMware ESXi host

Hello Everyone,

Today, I wanted to write an article on how to check firmware and drivers of Network card of an ESXi host.

The reason behind this article is that I receive a lot of requests in regards to issues related to the Network cards on the ESXi hosts.

Most often or not, I need to get this information in order to verify the firmware and drivers of Network card and compare it to the VMware HCL guide.

And also, I need this information in order to check any known issues with respect to any of the drivers that are currently running on the host.

Hence, I decided to educate the most of you here so that these tasks can be performed by each individual that is reading this article.

And as always, it is good to know the information in case you decide to troubleshoot some of the stuff yourself and do not want to raise a support request with VMware. ( less work for me 😉 )

Alright, moving on, we will first need to list the Network cards that are currently on the ESXi host.

To perform these actions, you would have to first take an SSH session to the ESXi host and log in using the appropriate credentials.

There are couple of commands that will help you fetch these details

esxcli network nic list

The above command is from the esxcli network namespace.

And there is a legacy command that can also be used to get the same information.

esxcfg-nics -l

The output of the commands will be similar to what is seen below:

Name PCI Device Driver Admin Status Link Status Speed Duplex MAC Address MTU Description
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
vmnic0 0000:04:00.0 tg3 Up Up 1000 Full 40:xx:xx:xx:xx:58 1500 Broadcom Corporation NetXtreme BCM5719 Gigabit Ethernet
vmnic1 0000:04:00.1 tg3 Up Up 1000 Full 40:xx:xx:xx:xx:59 1500 Broadcom Corporation NetXtreme BCM5719 Gigabit Ethernet

The output will be a little messed up if you are using a small screen, but the most important thing to note is the name of the driver installed, description field and also the link status.

Using the above information, we will now check the version of the driver and firmware that is currently installed.

For this, we will make use of the command ethtool.