I use cheap Mellanox X-2 cards in my homelab to get 10G

ESXi 7.0 doesn’t support the X-2, so I upgraded to the X-3 and two interesting things stuck out:

  1. Despite both cards being single port SFP+ for 10G the X-3 is half the size. (The heatsink is also smaller. I really should double check the temps.)
  2. ESXi kept all the same IP information and setup when I replaced the X-2. I thinking maybe it was because I put the X-3 into the same PCI-E slot as the X-2. Regardless, that was a very welcome surprise.