TP-LINK nic in ESXi 5.0

[Trojaneca]

Hello guys. I am preparing a lab environment for testing purposes only. I have a ESXi 5.0 installed on my machine, it is working great with the onboard nic, no problems at all. But I want to use a second VM for the purposes of Router + WiFi access point, so I bought TP-LINK Model: TL-WN781ND, its a 150 Mbit/s Wireless N nic. Unfortunately ESXi 5.0 does not seem to recognize it so I cannot assign it to any VM.

My question is:

Is it possible to install a driver so that the NIC gets recognized by ESX? Or at least pass the PCI-E port to the guest VM and it handles it (install driver etc.)

Thanks very much.

[zXi_Gamer · Accepted solution]

Greetings and welcome to the communities.

As far as from the latest drivers provided by VMware, the WiFi cards are not supported.

This leaves us the option of giving a PassThrough to the VM using DirectPath

You have to enable VT-D in your BIOS> processor configuration if its an intel and  IOMMU if its an AMD processor and provided your nic card is supported under VMware VMDirect supported hardware :smileysilly: http://communities.vmware.com/docs/DOC-11089

while a lot of hardware not-supported still work under DirectPath, you should make a try to see if your card works

[Trojaneca]

"Host does not support passthrough configuration."

Just for clarification I think my processor does not support virtualization technology...

Does that mean I'm screwed?

Is there any other way to do this?

[NickMarshall9]

Hi,

As stated above, wireless NICs are not supported

About the only thing you could do without buying more hardware is run ESXi nested, that is, a VM of ESXi on top of your existing physical ESXi 5 host. You can then add as many vmnics as you like, for routing purposes. This doens't really help you for wireless however.

There's a pre-built / automated set up of nested ESXi called the AutoLab you can download on labguides.com

Cheers,

[NickMarshall9]

What's your CPU?

Most modern CPUs will do virtualization, it's just a matter of turning the feature on in you BIOS if it's not already on.

Cheers,

[zXi_Gamer]

Well, not entirely screwed :smileydevil:. Once you can always compile a driver and make it work. I believe vibtool is available for the same. And also you can work the other way by creating a WS and hosting ESXi5.0 and VMs inside it and the VMs in the WS will be using the WiFi and one VM you can set as Wifi access point. Worth a try

[Trojaneca]

This is an interesting idea... Sound a little crazy though (write your own driver) :smileygrin: But why not. Any guide how to do it? And even if I succeed, how could I install this driver to the esxi 5.0 host?

Thanks

P.S. What do you mean by WS?

[zXi_Gamer]

http://www.yellow-bricks.com/2011/11/29/how-to-create-your-own-vib-files/ might be helpful to you, btw WS-> Workstation