How to check ESXi vmnic driver and firmware detail

This is something which you may need to check while troubleshooting a network card related issue on ESXi host and want to cross verify the vmnic driver / Firmware version compatibility with VMware HCL.

In order the check the required vmnic driver/firmware detail, first connect the to the desired ESXi host over ssh using Putty or you may also connect to DCUI, 

Now use following command to get detail of connected network cards,

# esxcli network nic list

There is also a legacy command to get the same information,

# esxcfg-nics -l 

Once you identified the required vmnic name, then use one of the below command to get firmware and driver detail.

 # ethtool -i vmnic_name 

Or

# esxcli network nic get -n vmnic_name

Refer to following screenshot to see the same in action, 

Here the Firmware version is listed as N/A just because the screenshot is taken from my nested lab.

That's it... :)