Azure MANA NIC Rollout: Could It Impact Your Aviatrix Gateways?

If you run Aviatrix on Azure, there is a slow-moving infrastructure change happening underneath your gateways right now that is worth paying attention to. Microsoft started rolling out a new generation of network hardware on May 26, 2026, called MANA (Microsoft Azure Network Adapter). For most Azure workloads, the change is invisible. For network virtual appliances (NVAs) like Aviatrix gateways, it is not, and Aviatrix has issued a field notice ( FN-2026-AZ-001 ) telling customers to take action. What is MANA and Why is Microsoft Rolling it Out? For roughly a decade, Azure VMs with Accelerated Networking enabled have used Mellanox-based NICs exposed to the guest as mlx4/5 SR-IOV adapters . SR-IOV (Single Root I/O Virtualization) lets the VM talk to the network card hardware directly, bypassing the hypervisor's virtual switch. This is what gives Accelerated Networking its low-latency, high-throughput characteristics. Microsoft has been quietly building its own in-house networking silicon. MANA is the result: a Microsoft-designed network adapter that replaces the Mellanox hardware Azure has been using on the host side. From an Azure customer's perspective, MANA preserves Accelerated Networking semantics, but the device the guest OS sees is different. The driver is different. The interface name is different. And that is where Aviatrix gateways run into trouble. Why Aviatrix Gateways Are Affected Aviatrix gateways are not generic VMs. They run a custom data plane that binds tightly to the underlying NIC for performance reasons. Specifically, the gateway image expects the Mellanox driver to be present and operational. On MANA hardware, that driver is no longer in play, and the gateway image does not yet include a MANA-aware driver. Per the field notice, the symptom is intermittent performance degradation rather than an outright outage. That makes it harder to detect: throughput drops, latency spikes, or session resets that look like noise can be the early signs of a gate