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Have this set up with a crossover cable to a NAS with isczy targets for the VMs. Much faster than the onboard lan, which was also an intel chipset.

easy plug and play install did improve net speed.

I have a pretty high end ESXi5 server I built and I wanted to be able to separate the NICs for things like having different networks separated and this worked beautifully. If you want to setup a firewall on a VM and dedicate NICs to those networks, this works well.

Awesome fast. We did a transfer between 2 servers sith 10G and got over 600MB / sec.

The obvious question is why one would purchase this card over the far cheaper options. Generic 1Gbps NICs can be had for just over a tenth the cost, while Intel's desktop varieties run less than half the price of this card. Leaving aside the cheapest cards - ones I've found to cause more problems with data corruption and reliability than it's worth - the main reason to go with a server card is if you will be loading it heavily. If you're running your own datacenter, power-saving features such as EEE and DMA coalescing are handy, but that likely doesn't apply to most potential customers for this NIC. The I210T1 does an even better job at offloading calculations than previous generation NICs.Saturate a full 1Gbps connection with multiple streams and you'll see CPU usage drop in comparison to what it is with desktop cards. We put this card in a workstation to replace the on-board Realtek NIC. System CPU time dropped by 20-30% under very heavy network loads after switching to the I210T1. Another benefit to the I210T1 - and a possible reason to upgrade to this new model - is Audio Video Bridging (AVB) support. When working on projects where multiple media streams need to be perfectly synchronized, AVB worked wonders. Older NICs simply could not keep everything synced perfectly. We needed to work on 10Gbps connections instead. Being able to accomplish the same feat with a much cheaper card is great! The I210T1 is tiny. It fits easily even in systems with bulging heatsinks and video cards.

- Easy switch to HH bracket - Performant open-source drivers