Skrevet av Emne: VMware ESXi 3.5 and Realtek RTL-8169  (Lest 3351 ganger)

ATC

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VMware ESXi 3.5 and Realtek RTL-8169
« på: 29. Mai 2011, 00:17 am »
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  • The adapter works fine in Windows and Linux but VMware ESXi does not detect it. Checking the HCL, the Realtek chipset, popular as it is, is NOT officially supported for some reason. "lspci" shows it as "Realtek Semiconductor Co., Ltd. RTL-8169". Any attempt to manually upload the driver fails as the OS seems to get overwritten at boot.



    ATC

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    [Solved] VMware ESXi 3.5 and Realtek RTL-8169
    « Svar #1 på: 29. Mai 2011, 00:17 am »
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  • ESXi does indeed overwrite itself every time it boots, because it is designed as an embedded OS. Fortunately, VMware left in a mechanism for customizing it, called oem.tgz

    By default, this archive only contains a tiny text file suggesting its purpose but you can place any custom drivers etc in this archive and they will be deployed automatically at boot. This means all you have to do is get your hands on a custom ESXi driver.

    Download the community built tgz package for Realtek 8169 from http://sourceforge.net/projects/open-vdrivers/
    or my copy at http://floyd.atc.no/download/mymods-0.1.tgz

    cd /bootbank
    cp oem.tgz oem.tgz.old
    Use "wget" or "scp" to fetch the custom built tgz file "mymods-0.1.tgz"
    mv mymods-0.1.tgz oem.tgz
    Reboot the ESXi3.5 host