IARP

ESXi 5 and the Intel 82579

Originally Written: 2012-02-26

Specs:

Problems right off the bat:

Aside from that, I personally do not need the hardware passthrough, but I obvisouly had issues with the ethernet connection. To solve that problem I found a blog post elsewhere that gave the drivers and the converter program. Basically, all you need to do is download the ISO from VMware, download the ethernet driver and the customizer program then use the custom program to insert the drivers into the ISO, reburn that ISO to a new CD and then install from there.

Useful Code to remember

Since ESXi requires preallocated disks and won’t work with Dynamic sized disks, they must be converted. This is easily done through an SSH connection to the server, CD’ing into the folder with the disk and running this command:</p>

vmkfstools -i original-name.vmdk new-name.vmdk

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