CDCE USB Network AdaptersĪs mentioned earlier, I regularly rely on this capability and I personally own two different USB network adapters that support the CDCE specification which customers may find interesting, especially as the Reddit OP was looking for some options. Once you have installed ESXi, customers are still recommend to install the USB Network Native Driver for ESXi Fling as that will give you better performance but also broader support for other USB based network adapters. Given the primary use case for introducing the CDCE driver was for OOB management, one thing you will notice is that speed will always negotiate to 100Mbps and that is currently hardcoded. In fact, this capability was also heavily relied upon during the early days of developing the ESXi on Arm Fling, as the onboard network adapter was not fully supported yet. This can certainly benefit VMware Homelabs, especially if you have a hardware platform that does not currently have the required driver installed for networking.

One interesting and beneficial side effect of this enhancement is that for any USB network adapters that conforms to the CDCE specification, they would automatically get claimed by ESXi and show up as an available network interface demonstrated in my homelab with the screenshot below. With the release of ESXi 7.0, a USB CDCE (Communication Device Class Ethernet) driver was added to enable support for hardware platforms that now leverages a Virtual EEM (Ethernet Emulation Module) for their out-of-band (OOB) management interface, which was the primary motivation for this enhancement. To my knowledge at least, there are zero drivers for USB network interfaces without using a fling.Īlthough this was certainly true a few years back, that the only way for ESXi to see a USB network adapter was to first install the USB Network Native Driver, this is technically no longer accurate due to some recent enhancements with ESXi that may not be very well known.

The community already covered all the basics and I did not have anything to add until I saw the following comment: While browsing the (unofficial) VMware Reddit this morning and came across a thread where the OP was asking for a recommendation on USB network adapters that can be used with ESXi with their Intel NUC, which many replied with their recommendations and a pointer over to the USB Network Native Driver for ESXi Fling, which would be required if you are using one of the supported chipsets.

Vmware intel usb 3.0 host controller