ESXi 5.1 and Realtek 8168 / 8111 drivers

[lion_tooth]

Hi guys,

ich recently ran into a problem.

I converted one of our production servers into a host running esxi 5.1.

Problem is that the onboard Realtek 8168 / 8111 doesn't seem to work at all.

I found out that for some people the builtin drivers seem to work, for others not.

I wasn't able to find out, whether the NIC is still supported or not?

Anyone knows that?

I know it is not the best and reliable NIC but it has to do the job for at least the next 2 to 3 months.

Greetings,

lion_tooth

[a_p_]

There are lots of posts with Realtek on ESXi, where it seems to work for some people and don't work for others. Regarding the fact that a NIC like an Intel PRO/1000 GT (which may not be supported, but seems to work fine for everyone) is really inexpensive, I wouldn't spend time in trying to make the Realtek adapters work (which is like playing Russian Roulette anyway).

André

[LMerryman]

I was able to find a simple solution to my 8168/8111 delima purely by accident.I installed an LSI 9240-4i RAID controller and while it was recognized by the BIOS and VMware I had difficulty getting it to initialize. The RAID card is not the topic of dicussion, but during this diag procedure I found my Intel and the Realtek 8169 NIC I installed stopped working too.I tried everything I could think of until I just gave up and decided to choose the reset system configuration choice on the bottom of the menu.

Once I reset config and allowed the system to rediscover system hardware all NIC's came up and running, even the 8168. I scratched my head in wonderment and gift, but curious as to why so I tried to break it again to figure out what happened and can't seem to make it not work. Bottom line, once your VMware software is installed and you have a 8168 either on your MOBO (motherboard) or an add-in card, try reseting as I did and see if everything comes online for you. You won't lose your VM files on the drive, but you will need to setup the virtual machines again. Good luck.