A question I have been asked a couple of times now is “will the HP Proliant ML115 G5 support jumbo frames”?  Many of you existing ML115 G5 owners out there are probably looking at using some iSCSI or NFS based shared storage with your ML115 G5 lab server particularly if you are using VMware vSphere or Microsoft’s Hyper-V and need a central place to storage your VMs. As you probably know enabling jumbo frames can give you significant performance increase between your host and the shared storage by not having to transmit as many network packets which can only be a good thing.

Though I hate to be the bearer of bad news as unfortunately the NC105i integrated network controller found in the HP Proliant ML115 G5 doesn’t support jumbo frames as it uses the Broadcom BCM5722 controller chip which, as you can see below, doesn’t provide this functionality.

So what this means is that if you want to run jumbo frames from your ML115 G5 then you will have to add a PCI or PCIe based network adapter which has the jumbo frames functionality.  I use these two VMware ESX/ESXi approved network cards mentioned in my earlier post here, both of which support jumbo frames and can be picked up for a reasonable price on EBay or similar.

Hope this helps prevent any confusion and saves you time in trying to get jumbo frames to work.