Make a baremetal NEW installation of ESXi with RTL8111/8168/8411

[lagagne]

Hi, I have never used ESXi or vSphere before but I need to get it work on a PC that only has a RTL8111/8168/8411 Ethernet controller. I've tried using ESXi-Customizer-PS (https://www.v-front.de/p/esxi-customizer-ps.html) to integrate the driver into the ISO but I got blue screens more than once when came the time to use Rufus or Unetbootin to make a bootable USB with it.

I have two questions and if I get an answer to only one of them I will be happy:

1st: Is there still a way to get ESXi 5.1 for free? I think the free vSphere Hypervisor started with version 6.0 but I may be mistaken.

2nd: Do you know what my be causing the blue screen? I will happily provide more information but I'm not sure what might be relevant. I'm using the customizer inside a Windows 10 VM running on VMWare Workstation 12 (with Workstation 10 compatibility) on a Ubuntu machine.

EDIT: 3rd question: If I use ESXi Customizer can I use my free vSphere Hypervisor license or it's not even gonna be the right software?

Thanks in advance,

Louis-André

Message was edited by: Louis-André Gagné

[lagagne]

I found the ESXi 5.1 free iso from the official VMWare site. When I you land on this page: https://my.vmware.com/en/group/vmware/evalcenter?p=free-esxi6 (the only page to download the vSphere Hypervisor that has a link going to it) you have to change the 6 for 5... Then it seems to be only for version 5.5 but when you subscribe for the license, the older versions are available for download too.

Anyway I still have a problem. I tried to install it but i have this error:

Error loading /s.v00

Fatal error: 33 (inconsistent data).

I'm gonna keep looking for a solution but I just wanted to let you know my original problem was solved.

[lagagne · Accepted solution]

I've finally successfully installed and activated vSphere Hypervisor 6.5.

My blue screen was due to some sort of system failure by using Rufus or Unetbootin inside a VM. I don't know why but when I got the blue screen with an official ISO I figured it wasn't the customizer's fault so I used the ESXi-Customizer-PS again and added in the net55-r8168 and  sata-xahci VIBs (not sure I needed the latter but as I'm gonna plug in SSDs I'd better be safe than sorry). Then I got the ISO out of my Windows VM and used Unetbootin on my Ubuntu host, no problem this time. I intalled it without any problem and my free license was eligible too.