VMware ESXi 3.5 and Realtek RTL-8169

[ATC]

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]

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