Network engineer from Turin. Mostly Dell and HPE.
The thread starter documented that 82599-based X520 cards carry an undocumented EEPROM bit (IXGBEDEVICECAPSALLOWANYSFP, lowest bit of the capability word at byte offset 0x58, typically 0xFC locked / 0xFD unlocked) that decides whether non-Intel active SFP+ modules are accepted on ESXi and Windows…
Intel X520 (82599) cards enforce a list of approved SFP+ modules; under Linux the ixgbe parameter helps, but on Windows or ESXi there is no such option. The gist provides a Python script that reads the card EEPROM with ethtool -e and sets bit 0 of the byte at offset 0x58 (0 = Intel modules only, 1…
On an HP 5120-EI the poster inserted an Allied Telesis AT-SPEX 1310 nm SFP and got a PHONY ENTITY trap plus OPTMOD/4/FIBERSFPMODULENOWINVALID: This is not a supported transceiver for this platform; the port never came up. The poster looked for a command to disable enforcement of SFP coding. Later…