ESXi 3.5 Update 4 Network Interface Card problems

[BitHacker]

Hello,

I have been trying to set up ESXi 3.5 on my HP Proliant DL140 (generation 1). It installs

without any problem but after booting shows the IP Address as 0.0.0.0 and only gives "factory reset"

as an option in the NIC config menu.

This server has dual Broadcom NetXtream BCM5704 Gigabit ethernet cards. After some searching

this chipset seems to be officially supported. After reading this I went into the unsupported command

line mode and did a lspci. The output looked somewhat like...

02:00:00 14e4:1647 Broadcom...

02:00:01 14e4:1647 Broadcom...

This leads me to believe that Esxi knows the cards exist (it labled them as vmnic0 and 1) but for some

reason cannot configure them. Have any of you had a similar problem?

P.S. I checked for BIOS updates and there were none avalible.

[AndreTheGiant]

The lspci command show only the hardware attached... not the recognized hardware

What's the output of this command?

esxcfg-nics -l

Andre

[bulletprooffool]

Are these NICs on the VMware HCL?If not, it is generally easier to just get a NIC that is, than to try set up your own drivers etc for it.

[BitHacker]

esxcfg-nics -l shows that there are no network interface cards present, however these

cards are on the compatablility list. Some additional searching turned up the possability

that this could be a problem with ACPI. I tried to disable it while installing but that caused

the installer to hang at the welcome screen. I think that ACPI is likely the problem as

the installer also had problems finding my IDE hard drives. I will do some more experimentation

and post back.