If you are using Intel X710,XL710 or X722 adapters in your environment, you may have already noticed, that LLDP (Link Layer
Discovery Protocol) is not working for you. And you are getting following message “Link Layer Discovery Protocol is not available on this physical network adapter”
Apparently those cards have their own LLDP agent used by their internals which is not forwarding LLDP frames to the networking stack.
Solution for this is to disable this agent, however you need to be running specific driver and firmware combination:
For Intel X710,XL710 you need to be running at least i40en 1.5.6 and FW 6.0.x and later
Support for Intel x722 should have been released with the driver i40en 1.7.11 and FW 3.10. It was not working for me, therefore I checked with Intel at their forums and looks like they forgot to include it. At least they promised it will be there in the next (December’s) release.
Note: To verify your network card driver and FW combination you can run
esxcli network nic get -n vmnic0
Let me cite the latest i40en 1.7.11 release notes:
Link Layer Discovery Protocol (LLDP) supports Intel X710 and XL710 adapters with FW 6.0 and later
as well as X722 adapters with FW 3.10 and later.
Set LLDP driver load param to allow or disallow LLDP frames forwarded to the network stack
LLDP agent is enabled in firmware by default (Default FW setting)
Set LLDP=0 to disable LLDP agent in firmware
Set LLDP=1 to enable LLDP agent in firmware
Set LLDP to anything other then 0 or 1 will fallback to the default setting (LLDP enabled in firmware)
LLDP agent is always enabled in firmware when MFP (Multi Functional Port, i.e. NPAR) is enabled,
regardless of the driver parameter LLDP setting.
When the LLDP agent is enabled in firmware, the ESXi OS will not receive LLDP frames and Link Layer
Discovery Protocol information will not be available on the physical adapter inside ESXi.
Please note that the LLDP driver module parameter is an array of values. Each value represents LLDP agent
setting for a physical port.
Please refer to “Command Line Parameters” section for suggestions on how to set driver module parameters.
In short, to have LLDP working with 4port card you need to run the following command (0 for each port):
esxcli system module parameters set -m i40en -p LLDP=0,0,0,0
Don’t forget one thing, LLDP is vSphere Distributed Switch function , it is not an option for the vSphere Standard Switches.
Update 25th March 2019: Looks like Intel had troubles implementing LLDP control in the driver for x722 so they released “X722-LLDP-FW-Setting-Tool“ to control this functionality via FW directly. It can be found at Lenovo Site. I didn’t have to install QV driver for ESXi.
15) In \TOOLS folder, a tool for end users to configure LLDP setting in NVM for X722 products ( To enable or disable LLDP in X722 FW/NVM ) is provided in /X722-LLDP-FW-Setting-Tool folder. Please follow the information and instructions provided.
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Hi Dusan, thank you for the hint reg. X722 FW and LLDP bypass via “esxcli system module parameters set -m i40en -p LLDP=0,0,0,0”.! It was really necessary for our Fujitsu RX4770M5 servers to upgrade X722 NIC firmware first from 3.33 to 5.10 to get LLDP command working properly. Thx a lot! Regards, Cop