2014: Year-end review

2014 - the fourth year of V-Front - is coming to an end. Like in the last years I have a list of highlights that I want to share - in case you missed any of them ...

How to make your unsupported NIC work with ESXi 5.x or 6.0

When you try to install VMware ESXi on some whitebox hardware that is not officially supported by VMware then your attempt might come to an unpleasant end after the installer presented the error message shown above. ESXi has in-box support for a limited number of network interface cards (NICs), and sadly a lot of consumer grade devices are not on the list.

Is this the end of the world? No. If you are a regular reader of my blog then you probably already know that help (and in some cases even rescue) is available. However, I keep getting e-mails from people asking how to get their NIC xyz to work with ESXi ... So I finally took the time to write down all the steps that you need to take and the options you have - just to point them here instead of giving the same answers per e-mail again and again.

A very similar post of mine is How to make your unsupported SATA AHCI controller work with ESXi 5.5 and 6.0 - it is about a year old now and with 80k pageviews my most successful blog post ever. So far. Let's see how this one goes ...