One of the things you need to check while doing network related troubleshooting is network card (NIC) driver, version and firmware. The command I have used for a long time do to dig up this information is ethtool. This works in most (can’t say all since I just don’t know) Linux based operating systems as well as for VMware ESXi hypervisor.
When using the ethtool command you need to add the NIC you’re investigating e.g. ethX or vmnicX. First you need to find the NICs included in your system and for ESXi you can use both below commands to get the NICs included in your ESXi host:
- esxcli network nic list
- esxcfg-nics -l
The commands provide quite a lot of information including:
- Name
- PCI Device
- Driver
- Admin Status (only available via esxcli)
- Link Status. (or just Link via esxcfg-nics)
- Speed
- Duplex
- MAC Address
- MTU
- Description
commands ifconfig and or “ip addr” works in many Linux based operating systems.
To get the information mentioned initially (Driver, Firmware Version & Version) in a VMware ESXi environment just use:
- esxcli network nic get -n vmnic0
Just change vmnic0 in my example to the NIC you wanna investigate.
If using ethtool you’ll also get the information needed via:
- ethtool -i vmnic0
That easy and it has pointed me in the right direction multiple times during network troubleshooting.