Which network driver is required on a VMware ESXi 5.0 host for a vNIC to enter Cisco VM-FEX universal passthrough mode?

Defining Dynamic vNICs polices
It is recommended to choose the VMWarePassThrou adapter policy when defining Dynamic Ethernet vNIC policy for the Cisco VIC Adapter in the Service Profile.

The VMWarePassThrou adapter policy parameters are derived from testing performed under various workloads and are tuned for the Cisco UCS system to provide better performance on ESX with the VM-FEX environment.

Cisco UCS applies the VMWarePassThrou adapter policy parameters to Cisco VIC adapters during Service Profile association. Later, when the ESX OS is loaded on the blade associated with the Service Profile, the Ethernet driver of Cisco VIC automatically sets these values in the OS. Manual configuration and tuning is not required on the host.

You can choose to manually tune these parameters depending on your current requirements. However, improper tuning of the parameters can impact performance, cause OS instability and affect the maximum number of VIC Interfaces (Static / Dynamic vNICs).

● Configure VMXNET3 driver resource in the Guest OSs in terms of number of interrupts and number of queues (WQs, RQs, CQs).
● The values set for WQs, RQs, CQs and Interrupts on the Dynamic vNIC Adapter Policy must match the values for these queues and interrupts in VMXNET3 driver.
● Consider the resource configuration of all the VMXNET3 instances of the VMs destined to run on a server.
● Configure appropriately the adapter policy within the dynamic vNIC policy in the ESX Host; in order for a VMXNET3 instance to go into High Performance mode, the adapter policy must have enough queue and interrupts resources to satisfy the VMXNET3 instance configuration.

The Virtual Machines using the VMDirectPath Dynamic vNICs should have memory reserved. The memory reserved must not exceed the physical available memory on ESX Host. The Adapter Type for VM vNICs using the VMDirectPath should be VMXNET3

http://www.cisco.com/c/en/us/solutions/collateral/data-center-virtualization/unified-computing/vm_fex_best_practices_deployment_guide.html

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