Hi!
I think that's derive from Mellanox's marketing policy and Intel's SR-IOV support and VMware ESXi's limitation.
VMware moved from ESX to ESXi - That's a only distros.
That's a good choice for reduce patch, mainternance time and securities concern.
But there is a some problem to port Linux OFED to ESXi environments.
I was test vSphere 4 OFED on ESX 4.x and ESXi 4.x.
Result was very similar.
But there is some differences...
Some command on ESXi can't show a status like ESX.
I think past ESXi doesn't have a casual Linux kernel like ESX's console.
That's cause a problem to port a Linux based OFED to ESXi.
ESXi is a hypervisor.
That's a difference casual Linux kernel.
I'm also problem with SRP Target in very very high I/O load.
Mellanox add a memory tracking function in vSphere OFED 1.8.2 for ESXi 5.
They are well done.
SRP target on ESXi 5 was very stable dislike on ESX, ESXi 4.x.
Mellanox was well done.
But InfiniBand was a good player on Linux, not hypervisor.
If VMware think that RDMA must need for vSphere, they will co-work with Mellanox and launch a native support RDMA on their hypervisor...