ESXI 5.5 Home Lab

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AliceCooper

[H]ard|Gawd
Joined
Mar 25, 2007
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So I have tried to search for this, but after some digging, I haven't really found what I was looking for. Currently I have an ESXI box in my house that has two NIC's in it, one is supported by ESXI 5.5 and it works great, the other is not. I am going to be virtualizing pfsense so I need the second NIC. Would best practice be injecting the driver into the ISO, or uploading it to a datastore and installing via shell inside vsphere? Or does it not matter? I am trying to do things the right way, not the hack job way, thanks.
 
Doesn't matter. Upload to the iso using esxi customizer, reload esxi on your server and roll on.
 
So I found an article that said I could run the command I will paste below, it will install the drivers, and my NIC should be seen. I am just doing this for future reference, as I am going to pickup a native supported NIC card, but is this possible? Command is ran via SSH with ESXI host running.

esxcli software vib install -v /tmp/NICdriverhere.vib


Website for reference.
http://pibytes.wordpress.com/2013/02/17/vmware-esxi-network-driver-install-and-upgrade/
 
Yes. You can do that. Those are the steps if you are going to upload the file to a datastore.
 
Huh, my NIC still isn't showing up in the list after I install the driver. I got the driver in the TGZ file format off of the website, used a script I found linked here on [H] to convert it to a VIB, uploaded it to the host, then installed it via SSH console and that command above. The host has been rebooted.
 
No, I am trying to configure it in vsphere and label it as my WAN port.

https://calvin.me/part-1-install-pfsense-on-esxi-5-5/

Scroll down until you get to the first step which is installation. You will see he has two NIC cards, vswitch0 is the LAN, and vswitch1 as the WAN, mine only has vswitch0, if I try to add another vswitch and add a NIC to it, the NIC doesn't show up in the list. I only get vmnic0 which is set to vswitch0.

EDIT: I am going to try and load the driver while it is in the ZIP format to see if for some reason the VIB file was messed up.
 
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