Month: July 2015

Realtek NIC 8169 with ESXi 4.1

Posted on by Andy

Hi, ESXi does not recognize Realtek 8169 based network cards by default. So here is a little howto to enable these cards on ESXi 4.1. Simply follow the next steps and after a reboot the card will be there:

  1. Download oem.tgz
  2. Transfer the downloaded file to your ESXi 4.1 host trough SSH (e.g. with SCP or WinSCP)
  3. Enter maintenance mode:
    # vim-cmd hostsvc/maintenance_mode_enter
  4. Replace /vmfs/volumes/Hypervisor1/oem.tgz with the downloaded version of the file
  5. Reboot

Here is a nice link: how to customize esxi 4.1

Check here for more drivers.