Esxi Intel Nic Drivers

Jun 20, 2016. This might be sufficient for a standalone ESXi with a few VMs, but when you wand to use shared Storage or VMware NSX, you totally want to have additional NICs. A few month ago, this problem has been solved by an unofficial driver that has been made available by VMware engineer. According to 'Native Driver support in Dell Customized VMware ESXi 6.5'. I40en – This is a new 40Gbps native network driver for Intel 40Gbps Network Controllers replacing i40e vmklinux driver in 6.0.x branch. Ixgben – Though a new.

I had several folks ask me about an updated for ESXi 6.5, similiar to what I had created for. There were some changes that came with ESXi 6.5 and thanks to Songtao, I was able to build a new driver. For those of you who are not familiar with this particular driver, I highly recommend you give this article a read before proceeding any further. If you are interested in Realtek driver for ESXi 6.5, be sure to check out Jose's blog for more info. To to use this new driver for ESXi 6.5, there are some additional steps that is required. Below are the instructions on how to install this on an ESXi 6.5 host.

Step 0 - Download the or and upload it to your ESXi host. Step 1 - If you are upgrading from an existing ESXi 5.5 or 6.0 environment, the first thing you will want to do is uninstall the old driver by running the following command (specify the correct name of the driver): esxcli software vib remove -n vghetto-ax88179-esxi60u2 If you have a fresh install of ESXi 6.5, jump straight to Step 2.

Step 2 - Install the VIB by running the following ESXCLI command to install: esxcli software vib install -v /vghetto-ax88179-esxi65.vib -f Step 3 - Next, you will need to disable the USB native driver to be able to use this driver. To do so, run the following command: esxcli system module set -m=vmkusb -e=FALSE Step 4 - Lastly, for the changes to go into effect, you will need to reboot your ESXi host. Once your system has rebooted, it should now automatically load the USB Ethernet driver and you should see your USB Ethernet Adapter as shown in the screenshot below. William thanks for the great info and driver support.

I did use the earlier version when I built my first NUC 6th Gen and all went well running ver6.0. Now I am planning to upgrade to 6.5 and still new to managing the esx environment. You show above how to uninstall the old driver and install the new for 6.5. My two questions I have are this, should those steps be done pre or post upgrade to 6.5 from 6.0?

And second question which I could probable search for and find elsewhere but I will still ask, I have run upgrades before only from local keyboard,screen and booting from cdrom. Can you share the steps to do the upgrade to 6.5 from 6.0 remotely if possible or a link to an article post you like or wrote that shows those steps for newbs like myself? Thanks again.

Great article and fantastic job, and it works fine (intel NUC SkullCanyon, StarTech dual ehernet adapter), except. When rebooting the NUC, everything seems good, except the interface is actually not working (no ping, nothing) I have to either edit/save manually on ESXi administration interface the port group connected to the vswitch with the USB uplink, or in command line by removing/reattaching the vusb nic to the vswitch.

Weirdly, it doesn’t work when trying to do the same command line so in local.sh file (even with async delay) when launching command line in local.sh, outcome in log is: 2017-02-01T18:10:36.020Z: [netCorrelator] 428790423us: [vob.net.pg.uplink.transition.up] Uplink:vusb0 is up. Affected portgroup: pg_FO.

0 uplinks up And thru portal or command line, it seomhow detect the 1 uplink, and that triggers connectivity event. 2017-02-01T19:15:37.367Z: [netCorrelator] us: [vob. Gva2000 Student New Car. net.pg.uplink.transition.up] Uplink:vusb0 is up. Affected portgroup: pg_FO. 1 uplinks up 2017-02-01T19:15:39.001Z: [netCorrelator] us: [esx.clear.net.connectivity.restored] Network connectivity restored on virtual switch “vswitch_FO”, portgroups: “pg_FO”. Physical NIC vusb0 is up Any idea welcome. Thank you so much for your USB drivers. Hi all, followed the procedure above on my nuc skull canyon, current bios, esxi 6.5 i’ve attached 1x single port Startech and 1x dual port Startech adapter via USB.

With lsusb is see the devices, but i dont see them in the vsphere host client nic management page Bus 001 Device 009: ID 0b95:1790 ASIX Electronics Corp. AX88179 Gigabit Ethernet Bus 001 Device 008: ID 0b95:1790 ASIX Electronics Corp. AX88179 Gigabit Ethernet Bus 001 Device 007: ID 2109:8110 Bus 001 Device 006: ID 0b95:1790 ASIX Electronics Corp. Total War Shogun 2 Patch Gamecopyworld Gta. AX88179 Gigabit Ethernet anybody any ideas on that? I’ve installed ESXi 6.5 Update 1 (build 5969303) and the same thing is happening after a reboot. Every time I reboot, I have to run the following two commands to re-attach the usb uplink to the vswitch and to set the usb uplink to “unused” in the port group policy for the corresponding port group.

This makes using the dual NIC setup pretty painful. Any suggestions would be appreciated. Esxcli network vswitch standard uplink add -u vusb0 -v vSwitch0 esxcli network vswitch standard portgroup policy failover set -p iSCSI-2 -a vusb0. There is such a mixed bag of experiences here. I wish I could say I’m one of the success stories like HapiRat and his NUC6, but I have had nothing but problems getting this to work reliably with an NUC6i7KYK and clean installs of ESXi 6.5. I started working with this setup early this year, with an earlier build of ESXi 6.5. The first signs of trouble came when I found that the port groups would sometimes swap their assigned vSwitches with each other upon host reboot.

This only happened with the vSwicthes uplinked to the vusb adapters, not the onboard Intel adapter and the management network (thankfully). When this happened I could not remedy it via the web GUI as I got all sorts of errors. I could only fix it from the CLI, which entailed deleting and recreating port groups in order to get things right. But of course a reboot of the host might mess it all up again. Other times the vSwicthes would just lose the vusb uplinks altogether on host reboot, as others have reported here. Again I could not remedy this with the web GUI and would have to use the CLI to re-add the uplinks. For whatever reason the ESXi web GUI just isn’t the same as performing the same commands from the CLI, which further adds to the frustration.

More recently I rebuilt everything with a clean install of ESXi and the latest 6.5 Update 1 in hopes things might be smoother. So far I haven’t seen any strangeness with port groups moving about, but I now consistently lose the vusb uplinks on host reboot and can only successfully add them back via the CLI. Again, the web GUI is worthless!

Worse, sometimes re-adding the uplinks doesn’t allow traffic to pass and the vusb adapters become useless. Right now the system is in a state where I can’t get it to pass any traffic over the vusb adapters even though all configurations look right. A few reboots and nothing has changed. I truly regret having spent so much time with this ridiculous USB adapter on ESXi. By the way, I have had absolutely no issues with Hyper-V and this USB adapter on the same NUC6 hardware. Insert and done.

I really wish ESXi would play as nicely. Hi William, Thanks for your work with these drivers. It’s much appreciated.

They seem to work very well. I’m wondering if you can comment on one particular issue I’m having with the usb nic after reboots.

I’ve installed ESXi 6.5 Update 1 (build 5969303). Every time I reboot, the usb uplink becomes disassociated with the vswitch and I have to run the following two commands to re-attach the usb uplink to the vswitch and to set the usb uplink to “unused” in the port group policy for the corresponding port group. Esxcli network vswitch standard uplink add -u vusb0 -v vSwitch0 esxcli network vswitch standard portgroup policy failover set -p iSCSI-2 -a vusb0. Yes, am having no issue. Hello vG, I’m struggling with the installation of USB network driver on my NUC.

I did the steps as above. I can see the USB dives >lsusb command. So that’s good. Installed the driver >Installation Result Message: Operation finished succesfully. VIBs Installed: virtualGhetto_bootbank_vghetto-ax88179-esxi65_0.0-1.0.0 So that’s also good.

Did the check command esxcli network nic list. There is other nic installed than it was. What did i do wrong. PS >bought this USB network card >StarTech USB 3.0 to Dual Port Gigabit Ethernet Adapter NIC with USB Port Best regards, Maurice.

For folks who mentioned they’ve had issues where the USB NIC’s configuration and association to vSwitch is not persisting, could you give a bit more background on the version of ESXi, the installation type (on disk or USB)? I personally don’t make use of the USB NIC that frequently, but I had recently re-built my 6.5u1 system a few days ago and installed the USB NIC driver and added it as an “Active” uplink and have been able to reboot several times without any issues. In fact, I’ve even completely removed the pNIC from vSwitch0 all together and as you can see from the output below, only the USB NIC is attached and reboots have been fine. [:~] esxcfg-vswitch -l Switch Name Num Ports Used Ports Configured Ports MTU Uplinks vSwitch0 1536 5 128 1500 vusb0 PortGroup Name VLAN ID Used Ports Uplinks VM Network 0 1 vusb0 Management Network 0 1 vusb0 I’m just wondering if there’s something else going on thats causing the issues?