Home Stand Upgrade or “How to Overcome Realtek 8168 Gigabit Ethernet” in vSphere 6.5

Many of us / you, whether they are network administrators, virtualization specialists, developers, or just people who are interested in virtualization, have their own virtualization home stand. And most often the hypervisor of this stand is VMware ESXi.

Last year, a new version of the hypervisor was introduced - ESXi 6.5, which brought us many interesting new products that I would like to “touch” (more details here and here , for example).

What to do if our "home stand" is built on a regular "desktop" hardware that uses Realtek 8168 Gigabit Ethernet?

Regardless of whether you are upgrading from a previous version or installing the system from scratch, you will most likely see the following picture:


This picture is due to the fact that, starting with version 5.5, the hypervisor does not have drivers for devices of the 8168 family ... Moreover! .. installing them by taking vib from an earlier version is also impossible (the driver and its name are in the black sheets of the hypervisor itself )

To "work around" this injustice, the enthusiasts of vibsdepot.v-front.de/wiki/index.php/Welcome create their own driver sets for vSphere ESXi.

We will use them!

Requirements:

• ESXi hypervisor no lower than version 5.5
• ESXi host Internet access (temporary) or downloaded driver packages
• DEPOT files for updating the hypervisor (available on the vendor's website)
• SSH or ESXi Shell server access

Note: when upgrading from version 5.1, please note that vCenter 6.5 can connect ESXi versions no lower than 5.5. The update sequence should include an intermediate version 5.5 or 6.0.

Let's get started!

1) Check which network cards we have installed at the moment:

~ # esxcli network nic list
Name    PCI Device     Driver  Link  Speed  Duplex  MAC Address         MTU  Description                          
------  -------------  ------  ----  -----  ------  -----------------  ----  -------------------------------------
vmnic0  0000:003:00.0  r8168   Up     1000  Full    1c:6f:65:43:fb:8a  1500  Realtek Realtek 8168 Gigabit Ethernet
vmnic1  0000:006:00.0  r8168   Down      0  Full    00:1f:1f:72:21:32  1500  Realtek Realtek 8168 Gigabit Ethernet

2) Let's transfer the host trust level to the installed packages to the CommunitySupported level:

~ # esxcli software acceptance set --level=CommunitySupported
Host acceptance level changed to 'CommunitySupported'.

3) Allow Http connections from our server:

~ # esxcli network firewall ruleset set -e true -r httpClient

4) We check the availability of the Internet (if not available, I recommend that you turn off IPv6 on the management interface and reboot the host):

~ # ping ya.ru
PING ya.ru (2a02:6b8::3): 56 data bytes
sendto() failed (No route to host)
~ # ping ya.ru
PING ya.ru (213.180.193.3): 56 data bytes
64 bytes from 213.180.193.3: icmp_seq=0 ttl=56 time=21.050 ms

5) Install the version of drivers we need:

~ # esxcli software vib install -d https://vibsdepot.v-front.de -n net55-r8168
Installation Result
   Message: The update completed successfully, but the system needs to be rebooted for the changes to be effective.
   Reboot Required: true
   VIBs Installed: Realtek_bootbank_net55-r8168_8.039.01-napi
   VIBs Removed: VMware_bootbank_net-r8168_8.013.00-3vmw.510.0.0.799733
   VIBs Skipped: 

6) ALWAYS RESTART THE HOST

7) Fill the DEPOT file on datastore (in my case, datastore1). After filling, run the update (in my case, before the release of 4564106).

~ # esxcli software profile update -d /vmfs/volumes/datastore1/VMware-ESXi-6.5.0-4564106-depot.zip -p ESXi-6.5.0-4564106-standard
Update Result
   Message: The update completed successfully, but the system needs to be rebooted for the changes to be effective.
   Reboot Required: true

8) Reboot and ... profit!

We knock on HOST_FQDN_or_IP / ui and enjoy the HTML5 interface.