ESXi 4 on Asus P6T SE with Intel Pro/100 S - network adapter not supported?

[RGoelz]

I have seen a few of these threads, but none have quite answered my question. I put together a whitebox desktop with plans to use it for virtualization with VMWare ESXi 4. The desktop has an Asus P6T SE motherboard, and the following specs currently:

• Intel LGA1366 Platform

• Intel® X58/ ICH10R chipset

• Intel i-920

• 6 GB of Kingston memory

• Intel Pro/100 S network card.

The install seems to go along swimmingly, but then trainwrecks right at the network adapter detection saying "network adapter not supported." I've read up on the HCL\HCG for VMWare ESXi4 and I've found that the onboard Realtek NIC is not supported. I bought a Linksys NIC which also failed and then as a last attempt got an Intel Pro/100 S card thinking that this bare-bones NIC would pass, but sadly none have worked. I have though about purchasing an Intel Pro/1000 adapter but I'm thinking if the Pro/100 won't work, a Pro/1000 won't work either.

I have tried changing the PCI settings from IDE to AHCI and enabling and disabling the onboard NIC without success. I'm not sure what else to try and I'd rather not run VMWare Server because it seems like a waste of resources to put Windows on this thing.

I have run ESXi before on Dell servers and I have an ESX cluster at work that I built on two HP DL280 G6s, but I don't want the noise of a full server in my house.

Has anyone gotten past this issue yet?

[a_p_]

Take a look at http://www.vm-help.com/esx40i/esx40_whitebox_HCL.php

There you will find components which are known to work.

André

[Borja_Mari · Accepted solution]

Hi,

check carefully this post to get a esxi 4 compatible network card.

In the esxi install time you need a compatible network card present on the host. Then is a good idea disable all the unsupported network cards and just left active the supported one(s).

Hope this helps

Regards/Saludos,

Pablo

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[RGoelz]

Pablo,

I looked through the HCL and the whitebox and finally just borrowed a Gb Intel NIC (HP NC7170 PCI-X to be exact). Once I had an e1000 capable NIC card installed I was able to get ESX to boot and get to the install.

Now I just need to find a workaround to the ICH10R RAID not being recognized by ESXi 4! Oh well, let's hope that they fix it in 4.0 update 2.

Thanks for all of your help!

Sincerely,

Rob

[golddiggie]

Install ESXi 4u1 onto an USB flash drive and then use another system/device to present storage as an iSCSI SAN (using Openfiler, or something along those lines). That should get you around any unsupported onboard RAID controllers. I'm using Openfiler on some Dell PowerEdge 860 1U servers right now. Once you get the Of device to present the storage properly, you can connect up, and then mount the volume(s) as you would pretty much any other iSCSI SAN LUN...

I would highly recommend getting at least a few NIC ports (fully supported Gb NIC's) for the host and iSCSI SAN. If your network switch supports jumbo frames, then get NIC's that do as well (that's something you can enable in the Openfiler software, if the hardware supports it). It is pretty amazing how fast you'll fill up a Gb switch with even a small ESX/ESXi environment...

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[redbaron51]

Agree with golddiggie,

I've got 2x ML115 running ESXi4 of USB sticks (with NC7170 cards) and have 1x ML115 running OF of USB stick.

I've configured 3x1Tb HDD in RAID 5 on OF and will add a jumbo-frame supported NIC tonight, as I am currently using the onboard broadcom NIC.

As well as enabling jumbo-frames on OF I think you also need to enable it on all vSwitches, otherwise the frames will be 1.5Kb

On another note: How can I update NIC drivers on ESXi4????

Cheers, RB51

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