ESXi 3.5 Intel Drivers

[hardke01]

Hi,

We have recently bout a load of Dell R610 servers. These come with onboard broadcom NIC's and an Intel Gigabit ET quad port pci card (82575/82576).

The broadcom nic's work fine however the Intel nic's are not detected by esx 3.5i. I have searched all over the place for som help with this but have so far come up fruitless.

VMware have released an update package for both ESXi 4 and the old ESX 3.5 systems but not the ESXi 3.5 system?

Does anyone know if a driver update for these cards is in the pipeline? if not any suggestion how i can get the drivers loaded onto the esxi 3.5 system?

Any help at all is appreciated.

Thanks

Keith

[Dave_Mishchenko]

The 3.5 driver ISO may have an offline update bundle included with it.  If that's the case then you can use vihostupdate from the vCLI (or vMA) to update your ESXi host.  Otherwise if you just have the driver then you would need to build a custom oem.tgz file.

[hardke01]

Thanks for the update. Unfortunately i have already had a look in the 3.5 update but no luck. I have also tried modifying the oem.tgz and replacing the igb.o with the esxi4 version but no luck either way. Im currently in the process of installing the esx 3.5 update on a standard server and planning to then extract the updated igb module from that.

I'll update here with the results.

[Dave_Mishchenko]

Between 3.5 and 4.x drivers went from 32 to 64 bit so they're not compatible.  Which driver download package are you using?

[hardke01]

I have downloaded and am currently updating an ESX 3.5 server with the following.

http://downloads.vmware.com/d/details/esx_35u5_intel_82575_82576_dt/dGViZGolaGJkZXBo

Hopefully when this is complete i can use the igb.o module from this system on the esxi 3.5 servers.

Thanks

[Dave_Mishchenko]

If you use something like 7-zip you can extract the driver from this path in the ISO \esx350-igb-1.3.19.15.2.1-205214.iso\VMupdates\RPMS\VMware-esx-drivers-net-igb-350.1.3.19.15.2.1-159614.i386.rpm\VMware-esx-drivers-net-igb-350.1.3.19.15.2.1-159614.i386.cpio.gz\VMware-esx-drivers-net-igb-350.1.3.19.15.2.1-159614.i386.cpio\.\usr\lib\vmware\vmkmod\

[hardke01]

ok, I have extracted as far as getting the VMware-esx-drivers-net-igb-350.1.3.19.15.2.1-159614.i386.cpio. How do i now get this to install/load onto the esxi 3.5 machine? is it just a case of sticking it in the binmod.tgz file on the /bootbank directory?

Thanks

[Dave_Mishchenko]

You can stick it in oem.tgz.  You'll want to add the driver file plus update simple.map - http://www.vm-help.com/esx40i/customize_oem_tgz.php.

[hardke01]

Hi Dave,

I have updated both the pci.ids and simple.map files in oem.tgz. Is there a specific place that i need to place the VMware-esx-drivers-net-igb-350.1.3.19.15.2.1-159614.i386.cpio file in order for it to be loaded?

Thanks

[Dave_Mishchenko · Accepted solution]

You'll want to extract that file and get into usr\lib\vmware\vmkmod\ - there you'll find the driver igb.o.  You'll create the oem.tgz to place that file in /usr/lib/vmware/vmkmod/  (best to double check this path to ensure it is correct for 3.5).

[hardke01]

Hi Dave,

Thanks for the help with this. Managed to get it working. Put the extracted igb.o file into a /mod directory then added into the oem.tgz file.

rebooted the server and can now see the nic's correctly and drivers appear to be working fine.

Thanks

Keith

[Dave_Mishchenko]

Glad to hear you have it working.