ESXi 5.x on Alienware M14xR2

[Dreek]

Hello everyone!

This is my first post, so i guess i salute you community!

This is the problem:

I've been trying to make ESXi 5.0 and 5.1 work on an Alienware M14xR2 for about three weeks already without any success in the NIC drivers.

Yes, this NIC is not listed in the HCL, yet i found some drivers in some websites (like http://www.vm-help.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=24&t=3494&start=20) where people claim that this driver works by adding the VIB to the ESXi Installation ISO.

Curious thing here, is that it DOES work, but only for a matter of 40 seconds, then i lose all network communications with the ESXi (including pinging), and in the console i see this error: "tx/rx overflow (status = 0x8)".

It becomes a loop of death, unless i unplug the cable and plug it back in, which gives me back 40 seconds in network life (yipee!) but then it dies again.

Any thoughts on FTW might this be?

Cheers ❤️

[dales123]

Hi,

Thats a laptop isnt it, personally if your having that much fun and games with it I would install windows on it with vmware player (or workstation depending on budget), then load esxi as a vm within workstation/player.

If you deply windows as thinly as possible with the bare minumum of drivers installed (minus all the bloat that tends to come with them) the windows overheard shouldn't be too much to bare.

[sparrowangelste]

I would go the workstation route and virutalize your esxi host.

[Dreek]

Thank you for your replies!

Yeah i've been doing that, thinning a WS2008 as much as i can and using VM Player to run them, however im really intrigued in why does that error happens, as it seems to work in some Linux distros as well as desktop motherboards with the same chipset, but not on this one.

Yeah its a laptop, the idea was to make a portable little deployable envirnoment manageable with vsphere.

Any ideas about this error?

[Dreek]

Status update: So far i have not been able to make ESXi 5.1 work with this ethernet chip so far. I have tried all the drivers and driver installations, it seems to be working for 5 minutes, can even ping and all, and suddenly it gets a stack overflow and dies.

Any update from my part will be posted here (as it works for all laptops with this chips, which are plenty).