For my home network I bought a Shuttle DH670 mini-PC (Intel i5, 32GB RAM) with two Intel I211 NICs. Vmware's compatibility page said that those are supported up to ESXi 8, so I thought "no problem". Besides, my old home-server is a Shuttle too (but with another Intel chipset).
During install (which I tried initially with ESXi 8, but in the end down to 6.0) I ended up on the dreaded "no network devices found"-page, asked myself why, but was confident to find information that will help to solve the problem.
I quickly found out that some other people had problems with that particular chipset too, but nothing I found matched exactly with my observations.
First I opened the console and checked if the NICs were recognized correctly - they were.
[root@localhost:-] lspci -v | grep "Class 0200" -B 1
0000:02:00.0 Network controller Ethernet controller: Intel Corporation 1211 Gigabit Network Connection Class 0200: 8086:1539
0000:03:00.0 Network controller Ethernet controller: Intel Corporation 1211 Gigabit Network Connection Class 0200: 8086:1539
In boot-log I searched for the pci address of the first NIC and found the following:
2022-12-28T09:49:38.886Z cpu8:524288)PCIE: 677: 0000:02:00.0: PCIe v2 PCI Express Endpoint
2022-12-28T09:49:38.086Z cpu8:524288)PCI: 1045: 0000:02:00.0: probing 8086:1539 1297:4132 0200 0003
2022-12-28T09:49:38.886Z cpu8:524288)WARNING: PCI: 87: 0000:02:00.0: Failed to add BAR[2] (10 f=8x1 0x80a24000-0x80a24020) : Limit exceeded
2022-12-28T09:49:38.891Z cpu8:524288)PCI: 1299: 0000:02:00.0: register Ing 8086:1539 1297:4132
2022-12-28T09:49:38.091Z cpu@:524288)PCI: 1305: 0000:02:00.0 8086:1539 1297:4132 disabled due to Insufficient resources or because the device is not supported: Not supported
(output was photographed and then send through OCR - so it's possible that not all characters are correct)
The "Limit exceeded" and "not supported" made me nervous, but I was still hopeful. In the process I tried to inject various community drivers into the install ISO, but to no avail. Every attempt on every hint from various boards I tried failed.
Has someobody an idea how to find the correct driver and make the NICs work?
I should say, that I'm neither a vmware buff nor a IT specialist in gerneral. So every hint is welcome.
If all fails, Proxmox seems to be promising for my home network, but we are using vmware at work too, so I'd rather would like to stick to ESXi...
BTW: I tested the NICs with Ubuntu and Proxmox. In both instances they were recognized and were working well.
Markus
