In the past, adding network interfaces to an ESX server was as easy as adding a flash drive to Windows 7 (works 99% of the time right?). Recently a server we purchased from Dell came with a and Intel Quad NIC expansion card. After installing ESX 4.0 I found that only the onboard NICs were showing up. Dell OpenManage showed the other 4 network interfaces as disabled. I messed around disabling the onboard NICs in BIOS and when ESX restarted it complained that it did not have the drivers for the network.
The odd thing is that Dell shipped this “VM ready” server with that expansion card. Further googling showed that these cards had native support in ESX 4.0 but no long in 4.0u1. Hence the drivers you will need to use this card. Download here.
1. Use something like 7zip to extract the .iso you downloaded to a folder.
2. Copy the folder to the /tmp directory on your ESX server using WinSCP
3. Connect to the ESX server via Putty
4. cd to the directory you uploded
5. cd to the directory labeled ‘offline-bundle’
6. Run: esxupdate –bundle=INT-intel-lad-ddk-igb-1.3.19.12.1-offline_bundle-185976.zip update
7. Reboot
Your additional network interfaces will now be available and configurable.
