Virtually Nick

RE: Community ESX(i) Driver Project

snocrash — Mon, 27 Jul 2009 00:19:20 GMT

Hey there... It's been very quiet since late February ?

Has there been any consideration on porting the realtek's over to V4 ?

RE: More ESX Drivers!

bhickey72 — Sun, 03 May 2009 17:40:09 GMT

Can you post any more details? I'm also trying to use this NIC in a vmware lab environment. But I've got the latest and greatest kernel which is version 2.4.21-57.ELvmnix and when I try to use your driver it tells me it was compiled with 2.4.21-27.

I was wondering if you upgraded to 2.4.21-57.ELvmnix and could send me a precompiled driver?

thanks,

RE: ESXi + PXE

Jim Nickel — Sun, 05 Apr 2009 21:36:55 GMT

Sorry...I should have been more clear. I wasn't talking about getting PXE boot going....just the driver.

I don't know how to get this RTL 8169 driver working in ESX 3.5. I did get it working in ESXi.

Thanks for your time,

Jim

RE: ESXi + PXE

nick.couchman — Fri, 03 Apr 2009 23:32:02 GMT

Georg:
Feel free to contact me with questions. I don't always respond in a timely fashion, so I'll apologize in advance!

RE: ESXi + PXE

nick.couchman — Fri, 03 Apr 2009 23:31:32 GMT

Jim:
ESX 3.5 is a different beast. The reason why ESXi works so easily is because it reads all of the boot files directly to RAM and then creates the root filesystem in RAM. It then has utilities to manage changes and stuff like that and write those things back to the actual filesystems. ESX, on the other hand, does a lot of local disk transactions and requires that you have things in the right places. Booting this via PXE would require not only the PXE/TFTP server, but also you would have to mount a lot of filesystems over NFS or something similar so that ESX had it available. I've never looked to see if anyone has tried this before, but it is a lot more work. The one thing that would work somewhat easily is booting ESX via iSCSI, especially if you have an iSCSI HBA. Even without an iSCSI HBA, it may be possible to use the software iSCSI initiator in ESX and modify startups and such so that it works. Not sure about that one...

RE: ESXi + PXE

Jim Nickel — Thu, 02 Apr 2009 18:13:43 GMT

I saw the instructions to get this driver working on ESXi and tried it and it worked!

However, how do you get it going on ESX 3.5 (not ESXi)?

Jim

RE: ESXi + PXE

KidLark — Thu, 05 Mar 2009 11:52:21 GMT

Hi Nick,

sounds cool to me. I' gonna try this too. If I run in to trouble, can I ask you a few questions?

Regards

Georg

RE: ESXi on Whitebox Hardware

basslineshift — Mon, 02 Mar 2009 19:31:21 GMT

Nick thanks so much for this info. It helped me get ESXi running on my supermicro x5dpa-tgm+ after a day of frustration!

Thanks again!

RE: More ESX Drivers!

Syyllinen — Fri, 13 Feb 2009 15:49:59 GMT

Great news!

I'll look forward to it!

RE: ESXi on Whitebox Hardware

nick.couchman — Tue, 16 Dec 2008 21:51:54 GMT

Maybe so, although this was actually a D600 (not C600) and had at least 512MB of memory. Still, maybe something memory-related, or it could be something about the Pentium M CPU it didn't like...who knows??

RE: ESXi on Whitebox Hardware

nick.couchman — Tue, 16 Dec 2008 21:50:37 GMT

Sorry for the delayed response. The short answer is I don't manage health on the systems. I installed ESXi on these systems because they were "left-over" boxes that I don't use much anymore and that didn't have a lot of use for anything else. Having a free version of ESX available there and the ability to use these machines for running a few VMs helped tremendously, but I didn't ever put anything mission-critical on these systems. Our new boxes are entirely Dell, and the health monitoring in ESXi/ESX works great for the Dell systems.

RE: Virtual Appliances: Increasing Open Source Popularity

nick.couchman — Tue, 16 Dec 2008 21:47:49 GMT

Maybe so...I'd like to see MS forced to change their licensing habits, but I don't have a lot of faith. Guess I'm just cynical about Microsoft that way...

RE: More WhiteBox Success

nick.couchman — Tue, 16 Dec 2008 21:46:16 GMT

No, I've not seen this issue. Is that a kernel panic on guest shutdown, or when actually shutting down the ESXi host?

RE: Virtual Appliances: Increasing Open Source Popularity

JMills — Thu, 23 Oct 2008 08:06:57 GMT

Microsoft licensing doesn't lend itself well (at all??)
to this type of usage.

Historically, yes. There's an ongoing attempt to remedy this, but I've only heard of a few vendors succeeding. If it does change, my hunch is that it'll likely be for newer products, rather than existing products.

-J

--
Jason Mills -- jmills@vmware.com
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Virtual Appliance Partner Enablement Manager
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RE: ESXi on Whitebox Hardware

mouseyd — Sat, 04 Oct 2008 18:14:38 GMT

I think Dell C600 laptop issue is related to memory. I noticed this when I was working with the dell gx400. If I have like 128mb ram it would not even boot right. Added memory..no issue.

RE: More WhiteBox Success

mouseyd — Sat, 04 Oct 2008 18:11:15 GMT

I have managed to do something similar. I have 2 dell gx400 p4 servers with 2GB ram running esxi fine. Only problem is that I get a kernal panic on shutdown....funny thing is on reboot it works with no issues. Have you experienced this? I will be working to ass Virtual center and iscsi to this setup very soon. Any info I can use?
Thanks

RE: ESXi on Whitebox Hardware

davidemiccone — Fri, 12 Sep 2008 16:52:43 GMT

Hello,
how do you manage health on Supermicro?

If a fan fail?
If temperature fail?
If hard disk fail?

RE: ESXi on Whitebox Hardware

nick.couchman — Fri, 15 Aug 2008 20:18:45 GMT

Sorry - appears that the bullets do not show up correctly - those items are supposed to be a bullet list.