[noinsight]

> On Ethernet, Intel is known for their little frills, stable line of NICs. That said, they have not been a leader since the jump to 10Gbps. Their 10Gbps line eventually came along and is solid ...

I wouldn't call them solid - at least the X710. The net is full of bad experiences regarding them. They're VMware certified but are apparently really unstable on VMware; I have no personal experience with that platform. On Windows Hyper-V hosts I had the NICs repeatedly go into "disconnected" status and individual ports would straight up suddenly stop working. On Linux KVM hosts that didn't occur, at least for me.

Supposedly upgrading the firmware to a recent-ish release fixes it - I haven't had it occur after. That's understandable. What's not understandable is that the NIC was released in 2014 and the issue was resolved only in like 2018 according to the net.