Hi,

I was able to install ESXi onto this laptop (Elitebook 8530p) following Dave Mishchenko's instructions (thanks Dave) at: http://www.vm-help.com/esx/esx3i/customize_oem_tgz.php however, I have run into a standstill. What I didn't think was going to be the problem at first is stopping me from using ESXi on the laptop: the onboard NIC (Intel 82567LM) is not working with the install. Running 'lspci -v' shows that the NIC is vmnic0 however esxcfg-nics doesn't show it.

The devices's PCI-ID is 8086:10f5, I've tried using the e1000e.o driver from the 'Community Unified oem.tgz 1.04' and from http://www.vmware.com/support/vi3/doc/drivercd/esx35-e1000e-0.4.1.7.html (which are probably the same as they have the same size) with no success I'm sure that this NIC uses e1000e because an install of the latest Archlinux shows itself using e1000e.

Looking at the e1000_hw.h header file (0.4.1.7, which matches the VMware driver release) from http://driverscollection.com/?file_cid=403567714116ecfc1c3958e53c4 I see:

#define E1000_DEV_ID_ICH9_IGP_M_AMT           0x10F5

is listed, so does anyone have any clue as to why this isn't working? Any help is much appreciated

Update: Archlinux shows that the e1000e driver version is 0.3.3.3-k6. That means 0.4.1.7 should have support for it. Did VMware yank this card out of the source? Does someone have their own compiled version of the e1000e driver for use with ESXi 3.5?

VMware ESX 3.x and ESXi Scripts & Resources:

http://www.engr.ucsb.edu/~duonglt/vmware