Hello, my dearest friends.
I'm here to register a situation that happened to me while trying to run an ESXi 8.0 U2 server in my home laboratory.
Dell Notebook.
Model: Inspiron 15 3520
CPU: 6 CPUs 12th i3 1215U
Memory: 16GB
Problem: All ESXi nested VMs were not reaching the external DHCP server. Sometimes they were able to obtain IP, subnet and gateway addresses from the external DHCP.
My ESXi host was fully accessible from the network, I could ping the external gateway within the ESXi host console and ping the ESXi host from my 2nd notebook. Accessing the nested VM (Win10) over the web client I was able to ping the ESXi host and vice-versa but it was it, no further communications. I even tried a Linux VM on the same host, but no luck.
After searching everywhere online I found out that in some cases enabling these options at the "Port groups" worked (not in my case):
- Promiscuous mode
- MAC address changes
- Forged transmits
Without luck, I kept searching and almost gave up, but since it was for educational purposes let's keep it going.
Then I came across this:
https://communities.vmware.com/t5/Flings-Docs/USB-Network-Native-Driver-for-ESXi-Documentation/ta-p/...
Searching at my local market/stores for these chipsets I found a USB adapter available, the UE300 from TP-Link (RTL8153 chipset).
https://www.tp-link.com/us/home-networking/usb-converter/ue300
I bought it and once it arrived I followed the driver installation steps at the 1st link above, rebooted and BANG: Server/VMs fully communicating.
Here are the adapter pictures: (the black one is the generic USB adapter with partial communication) and the white one is the fully working adapter.
I hope this helps someone: change the network hardware to a compatible one, I was fooled because the black adapter was auto-installed previously in Windows 11 and on ESXi 8.0 U2.
Thanks,
Edevald.