Fling

How to Update ESXi 8.0 with USB NIC Fling

by Florian Grehl
August 4, 2023December 10, 2023

The USB Network Native Driver Fling is a popular driver for ESXi to allow the usage of USB-based Network cards. When you downloadaing the driver, you might notice that there are separate versions for each ESXi Update release (eg. 8.0 and 8.0U1). Both versions are only compatible with their corresponding ESXi version, which makes direct updates a little bit more complex.

This article explains two options to upgrade ESXi hosts with USB-based network adapters.

Tips for using USB Network Adapters with VMware ESXi

by Florian Grehl
September 7, 2020December 18, 2023
15 Comments

Running Intel NUCs and other SFF systems with ESXi is a proven standard for virtualization home labs. One major drawback is that most of the available SFF systems only have a single Gigabit network adapter. This might be sufficient for a standalone ESXi with a few VMs, but when you want to use shared Storage or VMware NSX, you totally want to have additional NICs.

This article explains some basics to consider when running USB-based network adapters with ESXi.

ESXi VMKUSB NIC Fling adds support for 2.5GBASE-T Adapters

by Florian Grehl
August 27, 2020December 18, 2023
8 Comments

The USB Native Driver Fling, a popular ESXi driver by Songtao Zheng and William Lam that adds support for USB-based Network Adapters, has been updated to version 1.6. The new version has added support for RTL8156 based 2.5GBASE-T network adapters.

Multi-Gigabit network adapters with 5GBASE-T are available for a while, but those 5GbE adapters cost about $100 USD. The new driver allows the usage of 2.5GbE adapters that are available for as low as $25 USD. The driver was released yesterday, and luckily I already own a bunch of 2.5GbE adapters, so I could give it a test drive immediately.

CableCreation USB 3.0 to 2.5 Gigabit LAN Adapter (CD0673)

First Impressions: vSphere HTML5 Web Client #h5client

by Florian Grehl
March 28, 2016March 28, 2016
8 Comments

Today VMware made a new Fling available: vSphere HTML5 Web Client. This is what we all were waiting for! A HTML5 bast Web Client. No Flash! I've deployed it in my Homelab to see what it already can do. Of course, it does not have the functionality of the Flash based Web Client, but the performance is great and the design looks nice. The new Web Client is available for both, the vCenter Server Appliance, and the Windows based vCenter.