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Update Intel NIC Drivers on ESX 4.1

2 min read #vSphere #Miscellaneous #Administration #VMware

I Installed an IBM x3650 M3 the other day. During the installation the additional Intel NIC was not recognized by default in the ESX Host.

This I could see in two different ways, from the output on the console

msaidelk@esx9:~$ sudo lspci | grep Ethernet0b:00.0 Ethernet controller: Broadcom Corporation Broadcom NetXtreme II BCM5709 1000Base-T (rev 20)  
0b:00.1 Ethernet controller: Broadcom Corporation Broadcom NetXtreme II BCM5709 1000Base-T (rev 20)  
10:00.0 Ethernet controller: Broadcom Corporation Broadcom NetXtreme II BCM5709 1000Base-T (rev 20)  
10:00.1 Ethernet controller: Broadcom Corporation Broadcom NetXtreme II BCM5709 1000Base-T (rev 20)  
15:00.0 Ethernet controller: Intel Corporation Unknown device 1516 (rev 01)  
15:00.1 Ethernet controller: Intel Corporation Unknown device 1516 (rev 01)  
1f:00.0 Ethernet controller: Intel Corporation Unknown device 1516 (rev 01)  
1f:00.1 Ethernet controller: Intel Corporation Unknown device 1516 (rev 01)

And the GUI also only recognized the first 4 Broadcom NICs (instead of 8)

NICS

I posted an article about IBM x3650 M3 Does not Recognize NICs a while back - but as you can see from the output above they are recognized in hardware - just ESX does not know how to deal with them.

I downloaded the driver from VMware’s Site and extracted the files from the ISO image and the file I am interested in is in the offline-bundle folder

File tree of the vmware-esx-drivers-net-igb bundle with rpm, doc, offline-bundle zip and source folders

The host has to be in Maintenance mode for the patch update.

Install through vCLI

C:\Program Files (x86)\VMware\VMware vSphere CLI\bin>vihostupdate.pl --server esx9.maishsk.local --username root  -i -b [\\vc\VMware\ESX\INT-intel-lad-ddk-igb-2.4.10-offline_bundle-320657.zip](file://\vc\VMware\ESX\INT-intel-lad-ddk-igb-2.4.10-offline_bundle-320657.zip)

After installation

msaidelk@esx9:~$ sudo lspci | grep Ethernet0b:00.0 Ethernet controller: Broadcom Corporation Broadcom NetXtreme II BCM5709 1000Base-T (rev 20)  
0b:00.1 Ethernet controller: Broadcom Corporation Broadcom NetXtreme II BCM5709 1000Base-T (rev 20)  
10:00.0 Ethernet controller: Broadcom Corporation Broadcom NetXtreme II BCM5709 1000Base-T (rev 20)  
10:00.1 Ethernet controller: Broadcom Corporation Broadcom NetXtreme II BCM5709 1000Base-T (rev 20)  
15:00.0 Ethernet controller: Intel Corporation 82580 Gigabit Network Connection (rev 01)  
15:00.1 Ethernet controller: Intel Corporation 82580 Gigabit Network Connection (rev 01)  
1f:00.0 Ethernet controller: Intel Corporation 82580 Gigabit Network Connection (rev 01)  
1f:00.1 Ethernet controller: Intel Corporation 82580 Gigabit Network Connection (rev 01)

Host rebooted and it comes up with all NICs recognized.

Network Adapters table listing Broadcom and Intel vmnics with speed, configured state, and vSwitch assignments

I wanted to try this PowerCLI as well. I ran into some issues that I will address in a different post.