I'm tinkering around with a nested virtualization setup, ESXi on Azure, and need help.
The ESXi setup starts, however, it fails with No Network adapter.
I didn't found for affordable home lab purposes any ipmi/bmc/iDRAC/iLO/kubernetesified baremetal-as-a-service offerings. The hardware Azure VM size used is a Standard_E4s_v3 offering. The automated provisioning scripts so far are documented at GitHub - dcasota/vesxi-on-azure-scripts. The netword card presented is a Mellanox Technologies MT27500/MT27520 Family [ConnectX-3/ConnectX-3 Pro Virtual Function] [15b3:1004].
In reference to https://www.mellanox.com/page/products_dyn?product_family=29&mtag=vmware_driver (click on View the list of the latest VMware driver version for Mellanox products) the nic type ConnectX-3 is not officially supported on any VMware ESXi release. From a OEM perspective, https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/virtual-network/create-vm-accelerated-networking-powershell describes for an Azure Windows Server VM the use of the ConnectX-3 Ethernetadapter. Hence, it could be possible to get/make nic functionality for an Azure ESXi VM as well.
Using the Azure Standard_E4s_v3 offering, the no network adapter issue occurs with
- native ESXi image, latest 6.0, 6.5, 6.7
- customized ESXi 6.0 image using
- older Mellanox driver MEL-mlnx-3.15.5.5-offline_bundle-4038025.zip and MLNX-OFED-ESX-1.8.2.5-10EM-600.0.0.2494585.zip
- customized ESXi 6.5 image using
- a recipe description of removing first the softwarepackages net-e1000e, net-mlx4-en, net-mlx4-core, nmlx4-core, nmlx4-en, nmlx4-rdma and
adding afterwards the Mellanox ConnectX-3 offline bundle 3.16.11.10, and the net-tulip driver, too.
syslinux.cfg and boot.cfg were modified to use the advanced settings iovDisableIR=TRUE ignoreHeadless=TRUE noIOMMU noipmiEnabled
See setup output protocol attached: The Mellanox network adapter wasn't loaded (follow-up issues lvmdriver failed to load & nfs41client failed to load).
Any study work suggestions?
