Initial Installation Problems

[malebolgia]

I'm trying out the evaluation copy of ESX 3.5, and I ran into a little problem. ESX 3.5 can never find my servers network device, and as a result never starts the installation. This occurs both under the GUI install and the text install. Below is the error I get:

"The installer was unable to find any supported network devices.

Press 'OK' to reboot your system."

The server I'm using is a HP ProLiant DL150 G5, and from what I can tell the network device installed on it is compatible with ESX 3.5. Off the top of my head I'm thinking that the version of Linux that ESX is using might just be too old to recognize it.

Perhaps I should find a 32-bit RedHat driver for the network device on my server and load it up using a thumb drive before the Linux running ESX starts looking for a network device?

[weinstein5]

It is not that simple to load a Linux driver to get support for a piece of hardware - ESX is not built on Linux - the vmkernel is an o/s built form the ground up - the confusion comes from the fact that grub is used to load the vmkerenel and that the service console is a priveledged VM running RHEL 3 - check out http://communities.vmware.com/message/1001887 for a discussion on this topic - since the vmkernel is written from the ground up by VMware it is VMware's responsibility to qualify drivers for ESX with that being said since the HP DL 150 is not on the 3.5 HCL - - so I do not think ESX will have the necessary drivers to support it -