No Network Adapters

No Network Adapters

I ran into this problem today while trying to set up my lab:

Looking through various forums, the most obvious way to avoid this is to make sure your hardware is on the VMware Hardware Compatibility List before you start. Since this is a lab environment and I want to make best use of what I have, I'm going to ignore this. 

The next solution to this problem is to get an ESXi ISO from the hardware vendor that already contains all the drivers you need for the hardware. This is heading in the right direction, but since this is a custom built PC, I don't expect that the vender will have such an ISO. I will have to create it myself.

My NIC is an onboard Atheros AR8151 PCI-E Gigabit Ethernet Controller (NDIS 6.20)

While trying to find a solution on how to do this, I came accross Derek Seaman's blog that does a good job of explaining how you can go about creating an ISO such as this for your Cisco and HP servers. He uses PowerCLI, which is great.

So what do you need?

1. You will need the ESXi drivers for your particular device stored inside a .tgz file. If you need help in creating your own .tgz file, have a look at Andreas Peetz's blog under Step 1 of the Usage Instructions. I tried this, but couldn't get Linux installed at all. (The installation stops at the kernel helper, which is probably because of the NIC driver)
2. Get the Community Packaging Tools (again from Andreas's blog), which you'll use to convert the .tgz file into a VIB file. All the instructions are on Andreas's blog.
3. Get the ESXi Customizer from Andreas Peetz (consider a donation for this great tool!)
4. Lastly, you will need the ISO file for the ESXi installation. 

After about 2 minutes, my ISO file was ready for me to use.

Next, I used unetbootin-windows-581.exe to create a bootable USB key from my new ISO.

My Lab

The Host Hardware - a PC

Gigabyte X1 Chassis - R300

Gigabyte 585W Power Supply - R450

Gigabyte Z77-D3H Motherboard - R1400

Intel Core i7 3770 3.4GHz CPU (socket 1155) - R2700

Transcend DDR RAM 8GB - 4 x R400

Seagate Barracuda 500GB SATA3 hard disk drive - R600

UPDATE: This Motherboard comes with the Atheros AR8151 PCI-E Gigabit Ethernet Controller, which is not supported OOB on ESXi or Linux for that matter. Make sure your NIC is supported before you buy. 

For more advice on building a lab, check out Boelowie's blog. I opted out of the SSD disk and decided to double my RAM instead. I wanted to give the SATA3 disk a go first, which doubles the SATA2 transfer speed from 3 Gbit/s to 6 Gbits/s. The spindle speed is still only 7200RPM but it remains to be seen if there is any improvement. 

The base OS - ESXi

Rather than installing Windows 7, then VMware Workstation, then ESXi, then my VMs, I opted for a nested ESXi and then my VMs. The PC is only for a lab and I can easily set up the restart order of the VMs so that I can get back to my lab whenever I need to. The host is connected to a WiFi switch so that I can access my lab from anywhere in the house.