Kudos to Intel for recognizing & implementing a full Powershell module for their network adapters.
This is probably old news to most of you (and indeed, I think this was released in 2013) but I’ve just now managed to explore them.
How do I love them? Let me count the ways.
- With IntelNetCmdlets, you no longer have to fart around with netsh cmds to get your NICs primed to push packets properly
- With IntelNetCmdlets, your Network Engineering colleague in the cube next to you will no longer laugh as you suffer from Restless Finger Syndrome. RFS is characterized by furious mouse clicking interspersed with curses such as, “Goddamnit, I don’t have time to hunt through all these Device Manager menus just to input the Receive Buffer values I want! And I have four adapters! Somebody kill me. Now!”
- With IntelNetCmdlets, engineers who dabble in the virtual arts now have yet another tool in the box that can reduce/eliminate human error prior to the creation of an important virtual switch in a well-considered Hyper-V infrastructure.
- With IntelNetCmdlets, even your beater lab environment shines a little brighter because these babies work with my favorite NIC of all time, the I350 T-4 quad port server adapter, which you can now buy brand new (Probably a Chinese knock-off…but the drivers work!) for about $70 on eBay. Suck on that Broadcom NetExtreme and goofy BroadcomCLI!
Here’s an example of what Intel’s Net cmdlets can do for you.
Let’s say you’re building out a host in your homelab, or you just received some new Whitebox x86 servers for a dev environment at work. Now, naturally this box is going to host virtual machines, and it’s likely those VMs will be on shared storage or will be resources in a new cluster…whatever the case, proper care & raising of your physical NICs at this stage in your infrastructure project not only sets you up for success and makes you a winner, but saves potentially hours or days of troubleshooting after you’ve abstracted all this nonsense away with your hypervisor.
Of course this could all be scripted out as part of a Config Mgr task sequence, but let’s not get too fancy here! I’m no MVP and I just want you to kill your need for Device Manager and the cryptic netsh commands, ok?
Gifcam demo time. Here I’m setting the Jumbo packet value in the Windows registry for the four Intel adapters on my I350-T4 card:
What I love about this is that Intel’s gone the extra-mile with their Netcmdlets. There’s a full Powershell helpfile, with extras if you tag -verbose or -examples to the end of your get-help query. Any setting you need to toggle, it’s there, from “Green Ethernet” to how many RSS queues you want, to whether VMQ is enabled or disabled.
All you need? A quality Intel card (the Pro1000 cards prior to the I350 family don’t support this officially, but you may be able to trick the Proset drivers into it!), the Proset driver package utility (here) and Powershell. Hell, you can even do this while PS Remoting!
What are you going to do with all the time I Just saved you? Cheers
Wilson.tech 