How To Add A Nic Drivers To An Esxi 6 Iso

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If you need to install drivers in an ESXi host, this is how you do it:

If you have a new NIC card or a server of a new generation could be possible that the right driver is missing in the standard ESXi installation ISO. And without a working networking is not possible install the ESXi (the installation will stop because one requirement is at least a supported NIC). Jan 16, 2015  Here are the steps I took to resolve my issue: Enable ESXi Shell From the DCUI, press F2 to customise the system. Enter your root credentials when prompted. From the menu, select Troubleshooting Options. Enable ESXi Shell. From the DCUI, press Alt+F1 to access the ESXi Shell. Log in with root credentials.

Background Information

Recently I was building an ESXi host that used a CNA (Converged Network Adapter) for all network and storage, including for the management network. The specific card I was using was a QLogic QLE8262 CNA.

Normally if you don’t have a NIC driver, the installation will fail as it won’t detect a network card. In this instance however, I did have onboard NICs available, however in my environment these are not being used and hence had not been patched.

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Once ESXi was built, I went to configure the Management Network, however there were no connected NICs in the network adapter settings of the Configure Management Network section in the DCUI. There are two solutions to this problem:

  1. Create a custom ESXi image with the correct drivers injected and then rebuild the host using the custom ESXi installer image
  2. Manually install the drivers via the DCUI

I went with option 2, however if you want to know how to create your own ESXi custom image, then I have documented it here >>How To – Create custom VMware ESXi Image

How To – Install drivers in an ESXi host

The following steps document how to install drivers into an ESXi host using the ESXi Shell from the DCUI. I had to do it this way as I didn’t have network access to the host (other than via out-of-band management).

If you have network access to your host, then you could simply do the install via SSH, following a similar process to the steps below but instead of mounting an ISO you could simply copy the drivers to the local datastore or something like that.

Here are the steps I took to resolve my issue:

  1. Enable ESXi Shell
    1. From the DCUI, press F2 to customise the system
    2. Enter your root credentials when prompted
    3. From the menu, select Troubleshooting Options
    4. Enable ESXi Shell
  2. From the DCUI, press Alt+F1 to access the ESXi Shell
  3. Log in with root credentials
  4. Using your out-of-band management attach the ISO that contains the drivers. If you don’t have an ISO file you can create one using the Img Burn software
  5. List all of the CD-ROMs available to ESXi by running
  6. Write down the results as you will need this later on. Note: You might see multiple results – document all of them. Example: mpx.vmhba33:C0:T0:L0
  7. Mount the ISO so that you can access the driver files, by running the following:

    Note: If this doesn’t work try the other CDROMs from step 6

  8. Once successful, your CD-ROM will be mounted with the path of /vmfs/volumes/. In my instance my CD-ROM mount path was /vmfs/volumes/DOWNLOADS
  9. If you are not sure what your CD-ROM label is, you find out by running:
  10. Next we need to install the drivers. To do this you will need to know the exact path to the driver and the name of the driver VIB file
  11. To install a driver in ESXi, run the following command:
  12. Repeat the above step to install any additional drivers you require
  13. Press Alt+F2 to exit the ESXi Shell
  14. You will now return to the DCUI. From here, reboot the host

And that is pretty much it. Hope this helps.

Thanks
Luca

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TagsAdmin Toolkit, Fixes, Networking, VMware, vSphere 5.1

As part of my home lab I installed ESXi 6.0 on one of my older i5 Desktops, the PC has a Realtek 8168 network card built into the motherboard. I recently tried to upgrade it to ESXi 6.0 but it would not detect my network card and the installation would fail. It looks like ESXi 6.0 does not include an inbox driver for this card. When I originally installed ESXi 5.0 on this PC there was an inbox driver that got installed automatically and I did not have to inject it into the iso. Here are the steps how to inject the Realtek driver into the ISO image of ESXi 6.0. This should work for the following NICs Realtek 8168/8111/8411/8118.

I originally tried to inject a vib taken out of ESXi 5.1U3 offline bundle but that would fail with the below error. It looks like 5.1 vibs are not compatible with ESXi 6.0.

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Operation failed:
Could not obtain module order from esximage db
The installation profile could not be validated due to the following errors:
VIB VMware_bootbank_net-r8168_8.013.00-3vmw.510.0.0.799733 is obsoleted by set([‘VMware_bootbank_misc-drivers_6.0.0-0.0.2494585’])

Add Realtek R8168 Driver into an ESXi 6.0 ISO
1. Download the “net55-r8168-8.039.01-napi-offline_bundle.zip” file (ESXi 5.5 and 6.0 only)
My download mirror: net55-r8168-8.039.01-napi-offline_bundle.zip
2. Download ESXi-Customizer-v2.7.2. Even though it is meant for ESXi 4.1/5.1/5.5 it works perfectly fine with ESXi 6.0 and created a usable iso.
My download mirror: ESXi-Customizer-v2.7.2.exe

3. Use “unetbootin-windows-608.exe” to install the generated iso to a USB disk
http://unetbootin.sourceforge.net/


WINDOWS 10

As suggested, if you run windows 10, remove these lines from the ESXI-Customizer.cmd script

——————-
if /I “%1″”silent” goto :eof
if “!WinVer!””5.0” call :logCons — INFO: Running on Windows 2000. What?!
if “!WinVer!””5.1” call :logCons — INFO: Running on Windows XP.
if “!WinVer!””5.2” call :logCons — INFO: Running on Windows Server 2003.
if “!WinVer!””6.0” call :logCons — INFO: Running on Windows Vista or Server 2008.
if “!WinVer!””6.1” call :logCons — INFO: Running on Windows 7 or Server 2008 R2.
if “!WinVer!””6.2” call :logCons — INFO: Running on Windows 8 or Server 2012.
if “!WinVer!””6.3” call :logCons — INFO: Running on Windows 8.1 or Server 2012 R2.
if “!WinVer!” GTR “6.3” call :logCons — WARNING: Running on a Windows newer than 8.1 / 2012 R2. Don’t know if this will work …
if “!WinVer!” LSS “5.1” call :earlyFatal Unsupported Windows Version: !WinVer!. At least Windows XP is required & exit /b 1
if “!WinVer!” NEQ “6.1” call :logCons — WARNING: Your Windows version is supported for customizing ESXi 5.x, but not ESXi 4.1.
——————-

SOURCES:
Driver provided from this site: https://vibsdepot.v-front.de/wiki/index.php/Net55-r8168
ESXi Customizer provided from this site: http://www.v-front.de/p/esxi-customizer.html

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