The motherboard of my Haswell whitebox contains an Intel I217-V network card. See my “Haswell low power whitebox for ESXi and Hyper-V” post for more information. The Intel I217-V network card is not recognized by VMware ESXi 5.x by default. On the VMware community I found a post with the Intel I217-V ESXi driver attached. To enable the Intel I217-V network card you have two options:
- Inject the driver in the ESXi ISO using for example the “ESXi-Customizer” tool. See my blogpost “VMware ESXi 5 whitebox NIC support” for more information.
- Install the driver when ESXI is already installed. You need a supported network card to be able to install ESXi!
Here is a quick overview how to install the driver when ESXI is already installed:
- Download the driver
- Upload the VIB to a datastore by using the vSphere Client
- Start the SSH service on the ESXI server and make a SSH connection to the ESXi server
- Put the ESXi server in maintenance mode, command: esxcli system maintenanceMode set -e true
- Change the ESXi host acceptance level to Community Supported, command: esxcli software acceptance set –level=CommunitySupported
- Install the VIB, command: esxcli software vib install -v /vmfs/volumes/datastore1/net-e1000e-2.3.2.x86_64.vib
- Reboot the system after the following message “Message: The update completed successfully, but the system needs to be reboot“,command: reboot
- When the ESXi host is up make a SSH connection and exit maintenance mode. Command: esxcli system maintenanceMode set -e false
Check if the Intel I217-V network adapter is visible is the vSphere Client or vSphere Web client
