Installing ESXi for Realtek 8111 NIC

I decided to setup another ESXi host on a Mini-ITX build that I completed a while ago. After downloading the latest ESXi ISO (version 7.0), I created the bootable USB drive, fired it up, and… failure. I don’t have a picture of the error, but it boiled down to a missing driver for the network card. No matter, I’ll just Google away and see what I can find.

Long story short, I struggled non-stop for at least 10 hours trying to get this working before stumbling across the EXACT blog post that I needed to find: https://www.sysadminstories.com/2018/08/adding-realtek-8111-driver-to-vsphere.html?m=1. Turns out that the motherboard I’m using (ASUS Prime H310T R2.0/CSM) has a Realtek 8111 network card, just like the person who wrote the blog. Also very importantly, the author points out that this will not work for ESXi 7.

The Steps

My first course of action was to setup a Windows VM on my MacBook Pro because I don’t have a Windows box to use, and the tools that I’d be using are for Powershell.

Retrieving the ESXi 6.7 Offline Bundle

I had independently come across this blog with instructions about the ESXi Customizer, however I was trying to use ESXi 7 to no avail. The Powershell tool is available here: https://github.com/VFrontDe/ESXi-Customizer-PS. The tool also requires that you have VMware PowerCLI, available here: https://code.vmware.com/web/tool/12.1.0/vmware-powercli.

Using ESXi-Customizer-PS I was able to fetch the elusive offline bundle for ESXi 6.7:

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PS C:\Users\Andrew\Downloads> .\ESXi-Customizer-PS.ps1 -v67 -ozip

The -v67 flag gets us version 6.7, while the -ozip flag gets us an offline bundle rather than the ISO.

There should now be a .zip file in the directory named something like: ESXi-6.7.0-20201104001-standard.zip.

Retrieving the Realtek Driver

Next, I fetched the net55-r8168 Realtek driver from here: https://vibsdepot.v-front.de/wiki/index.php/Net55-r8168 (the offline bundle download). Despite the name, this driver supports Realtek 8168/8111/8411/8118 NICs.

Building the New ISO

For better detail, see the original blog post I mentione (https://www.sysadminstories.com/2018/08/adding-realtek-8111-driver-to-vsphere.html?m=1).

With both of the offline bundles (ESXi and the Realtek driver) in the same directory, we can now run some more commands:

1. Create the software depot:

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    PS C:\Users\Andrew\Downloads> Add-EsxSoftwareDepot ".\net55-r8168-8.045a-napi-offline_bundle.zip", `
       "ESXi-6.7.0-20201104001-standard.zip" 
   

2. Create an image profile by cloning an existing one:

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    PS C:\Users\Andrew\Downloads> Get-EsxImageProfile
    PS C:\Users\Andrew\Downloads> New-EsxImageProfile -CloneProfile ESXi-6.7.0-20201104001-standard `
       -name ESXi-6.7.0-20201104001-standard-RTL8111 -Vendor Razz
    PS C:\Users\Andrew\Downloads> Set-EsxImageProfile ESXi-6.7.0-20201104001-standard-RTL8111 `
       -AcceptanceLevel CommunitySupported
   

3. Add the driver to the new image profile:

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    PS C:\Users\Andrew\Downloads> Get-EsxSoftwarePackage
    PS C:\Users\Andrew\Downloads> Add-EsxSoftwarePackage -ImageProfile ESXi-6.7.0-20201104001-standard-RTL8111 `
       -SoftwarePackage net55-r8168
   

4. Create the ISO:

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    PS C:\Users\Andrew\Downloads> Export-EsxImageProfile -ImageProfile ESXi-6.7.0-20201104001-standard-RTL8111 `
       -ExportToIso -filepath .\VMware-ESXi-6.7.0-20201104001-RTL8111.iso
   

Create the Bootable USB Drive

I used Rufus as well to create the bootable USB drive from the ISO, but you can use any tool that will get the job done.

Install ESXi

After plugging in the USB drive and navigating through the installer, everything went well until the end when I received a warning about hardware virtualization not being enabled. Once the installer completed I rebooted and went into the BIOS to enable Intel Hardware Virtualization support. I then deployed a test VM and everything worked perfectly!

Note: You may need to disable secure boot from the BIOS prior to booting the installer

Limitations

It appears that this really only works for ESXi <7, which is not a problem for me since this is just a home setup.