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.