I recently found an offer on eBay for Mellanox ConnectX-2 cards which were about 10€ each. I had planned to connect my NAS to my main PC through a faster connection for a while anyways so I decided to buy them. Here is how I got them to work on Windows 10 and which driver I used.
Hardware
The cards I bought were ConnectX-2 VPI cards with a single QSFP port each. Which means they can operate both in 40 Gbit/s InfiniBand mode and 10 Gbit/s Ethernet mode. The exact part number for the cards I got is 81Y1533.
Of course, them being QSFP cards you can’t just use a normal Ethernet cable to connect them so I opted for a cheap used Direct Attach Copper (DAC) QSFP cable. The exact cable I got is a NetApp X6558-R6. Which is technically an SAS cable meant to be used with NetApp SAS arrays but will work just fine for any networking!
All in all I spent about 40€ shipped, a pretty decent price for 10 Gbit/s networking.
Drivers
Now, when you boot up Windows the first time it will actually install a driver for the card but that driver doesn’t work correctly. So you have to grab a working driver from Mellanox. The last driver version that officially supports the ConnectX-2 line of cards is version 4.80. However, while testing I found that the latest version (5.50.52000 as of the time this article was written) seems to work fine too. You can grab a driver from mellanox.com here:
Port Configuration
After you’ve downloaded one of the drivers, just install it as usual. Once the installation is done you will most likely find the ConnectX-2 card in device manager listed under “Network adapters” as an IPoIB (IP over InfiniBand) device. The ConnectX-2 VPI cards come configured in InfiniBand port mode as hardware default. At least both cards I got did.
To change this you have to go to the “System devices” group and look for the card there. Open its properties and head to the “Port Protocol” tab. Here you can untick the “HW Defaults” box and select “ETH” for Ethernet mode. Now just click ok and the card should switch to Ethernet mode.
Ethernet drivers
Now you will find the card listed under “Network adapters” as an actual Ethernet card. But, because Windows is Windows, it will again install a Microsoft driver which does not work. This caused me a bunch of headaches because it appeared that the card was configured correctly, and I was able to set everything up but I didn’t get a link. Which was actually the exact same behavior I got when the card was still in InfiniBand mode, adding to the confusion.
To get it working right you have to tell Windows to use the Mellanox driver you already installed. To do this just right-click on the card under “Network adapters” and select “Update drivers”. Next click on “Browse my computer for drivers” and “Let me pick from a list…”. There you will find both the Microsoft driver and the Mellanox driver you had already installed. Just select the Mellanox driver and click next. Windows should install the driver now.
And that’s it! The card should now work correctly in Ethernet mode. You can use it just like you would use any other network card on Windows. You can check out the properties of the Ethernet adapter to make use of other options like teaming or VLANs and also to check on your firmware version.
If you have any problems trying to get those cards to run, let me know, and I’ll see if I can help.
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