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mobcdi
Enthusiast
Enthusiast

CentOS5.3 & enhanced vmxnet not initialising

Is there a trick to getting enhanced vmxnet NIC to work with centOS 5.3 after installing vmware tools. I'm running vmware tools 3.5.0 build 123630 but after patching the machine and restarting my nic didn't start up. I removed it, rebooted, cleared out the network configurations and rebooted before adding the NIC back into the vm but now can't get the nic back in so the OS sees it.

Would someone be willing to help troubleshoot my enhanced vmxnet problem after helping me get CentOS to see it again?

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mobcdi
Enthusiast
Enthusiast

is there a way to manually configure the enhanced vmxnet via CentOS?

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puzzledtux
Hot Shot
Hot Shot

After you re-add the NIC to the virtual machine and reboot it, is it listed when you run the lspci command?

If the card is detected then I suggest that you probe the MAC address again in your CentOS..or manually edit it to reflect the same as in your virtual machine vmx file

In GOS check /etc/sysconfig/network-scripts/ifcfg-ethX

mobcdi
Enthusiast
Enthusiast

After I ran lspci I got

00:11.0 Ethernet controller: VMware Inc Abstract Ethernet Controller (rev 10)

What do you mean by probe the nic? linux isn't my strong point I'm afraid. I went looking for ifcgh-eth0 but there is no such file in the network-scripts folder bu there is a ifcfg-lo

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dxb
Enthusiast
Enthusiast

Try running "system-config-network" and seeing if that device shows up. If it does, you should be able to configure the network settings you want and then try starting the nic up.

puzzledtux
Hot Shot
Hot Shot

Since there is no file present, the network could not be configured. Go ahead and follow commands as mentioned by dxb and you should be up and running.

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mobcdi
Enthusiast
Enthusiast

Ran system-config-network after rebooting the vm and still no sign of the device either under devices or hardware tabs. Is there a way to rescan for hardware?

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mobcdi
Enthusiast
Enthusiast

I had a brain wave and tried to reinstall vmware tools. Got as far as "none of the pre-built vmmemctl modules for wmare tools is suitable" do I want to compile 1. The problem is now because I don;t have a working vnic I can't use yum to install from it and it won't detect the CentOS media as a repository even though it was able to install from the iso to get to this point

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mobcdi
Enthusiast
Enthusiast

The problem persists!

I scrubbed the drive & did a fresh install of CentOS 5 & vmware tools remembering to include the libraries & dev tools so I could run gcc. The vNic is detected but won't activate. In network manager I have the

  • device = etho

  • hardware = VMWare Inc Abstract ethernet

  • DNS set to my values

  • Hosts set to my values

If I open "Network Connections" there is a entry for eth0 but its set to use DHCP instead of manual and I can't modify it because the entries are greyed out

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mobcdi
Enthusiast
Enthusiast

I'm reverting to using an e1000 vNIC with CentOS5.3. It seems the OS build doesn't really like the enhanced vmxnet vNIC and doesn't detect it at install time properly, for me at least. Thanks to all who tried to help

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LucasAlbers
Expert
Expert

We run centos 5.3 x64 with vmxnet3 cards. I used the operating specific install rpms from vmware.

I did not have to compile.

It works great.

If you change the card you need to run the network config util and change the name of the file from eth0.bak to eth0.

The file is located it /etc/sysconfig/network-scripts/ifcfg-eth0*.

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mobcdi
Enthusiast
Enthusiast

Thanks for that, I need to make some changes to my environment first but sounds like the way to go

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