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Yesterday I decided to upgrade my two ESXi servers from ESXi 5.1 to ESXi 5.5 since the update came out some time ago.

The upgrade from ESXi 5.0 to ESXi 5.1 went great, without any problems. But this time, that is not the case.

My two ESXi servers are white boxes made of the following hardware:

Motherboard: MSI Z87-G43 (http://www.msi.com/product/mb/Z87-G43.html)

CPU: i5-4670K (http://ark.intel.com/products/75048/)

RAM: Kingston HyperX DDR3 1600MHz, 8Gb * 2(16GB total) (http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16820104173)

The problem was the motherboard that ships with an onboard Realtek 8111E network adapter.

This problem has been verified to be the same with Realtek 8168 and Realtek 8169.

The reason for this, is that VMware removed the drivers from the new ESXi 5.5 iso.

In this post I will show you how to get ESXi 5.5 working with the Realtek network adapters.



Some people don’t like to use “not supported” hardware this way, and others had connection problems on the VM’s after doing this. I did not have any problems, and have been running with this solution since I wrote this post (21 days ago now). So i think it is pretty stable.

If you don’t want to use the method below, you can always buy a Intel Pro 1000 network card and put it in a PCI-e slot.

I highly recommend the Intel pro 1000 series, they are fast, reliable and works on any OS out of the box (including ESXi), but they are a little pricy. You can get them here, with free shipping:

Intel Pro 1000 Dual port

Intel Pro 1000 single port

There are two ways to make the upgrade work on your motherboard:

Using a supported network adapter in a PCI-E slot (See above, regarding the Intel Pro 1000 network adapters) Creating a custom ESXi 5.5 iso with the drivers from ESXi 5.1

Putting in a extra network adapter was not an option for me, so I went for option two, and here is how I did it:

Creating a custom ESXi 5.5 iso including the Realtek network drivers

What you need

You just need a Windows XP or higher computer, and the software below.

Getting the needed software

First you need to get the needed software.

The following is what you need to download: