greengiant912 Posted April 27, 2012 Posted April 27, 2012 I am having some issues getting my network interfaces working on my ESXi whitebox. This is a lab enviroment I am setting up at home and just trying to get it working. I started out with ESXi 4.1 after doing some reading that my nics would work with it. I have a ASUS P5N32-E SLI Motherboard with onboard nics. I also installed an intel pro100/s (a little old schol I know) just incase my network adapters didn't work... I am able to see the two Nvidia nics that are onboard the motherboard within the managment interface settings within the ESXi console. However when I enter IP information for my network and get everything setup right I am unable to reach the ESXi server on my network (can't even ping). Any help would be grateful I have been banging my head on my desk for the past few days trying to figure it out... BTW I have ESXi 5 currently installed, but can go back to 4.1 if needbe.. Share this post Link to post Share on other sites More sharing options...
Lackadaisical Posted May 12, 2012 Posted May 12, 2012 Hey greengiant, I actually do a lot of work with esxi, but most of it is done in a server environment. Running it on desktop hardware is a completely different thing as a lot of times things are not properly supported. For my home "lab" I actually just run Esxi5 + Vcenter5 virtualized in VMware Workstation, as I primarily just use it for testing specific things before throwing it into the actual environment. The nice thing about esxi5 is that the nesting actually works using Workstation 8 and esxi5, while it did not work at all for 64 bit nested VM's on 4.1. Maybe I can offer some advice here, or at least try to. I would definitely stick with v5, over 4.1 if you can, it sounds as if you had no luck with either version so far so that does not seem to be the issue, is this correct? Being able to see your NIC's and still not ping after having all the information entered leads me to think that you are missing something in the configuration. What kind of device are you using as a default gateway and do you have any type of VLAN's set up or in use for your home lab environment? If you could provide a bit more information, maybe I can help. Share this post Link to post Share on other sites More sharing options...
greengiant912 Posted May 13, 2012 Posted May 13, 2012 Hey greengiant, I actually do a lot of work with esxi, but most of it is done in a server environment. Running it on desktop hardware is a completely different thing as a lot of times things are not properly supported. For my home "lab" I actually just run Esxi5 + Vcenter5 virtualized in VMware Workstation, as I primarily just use it for testing specific things before throwing it into the actual environment. The nice thing about esxi5 is that the nesting actually works using Workstation 8 and esxi5, while it did not work at all for 64 bit nested VM's on 4.1. Maybe I can offer some advice here, or at least try to. I would definitely stick with v5, over 4.1 if you can, it sounds as if you had no luck with either version so far so that does not seem to be the issue, is this correct? Being able to see your NIC's and still not ping after having all the information entered leads me to think that you are missing something in the configuration. What kind of device are you using as a default gateway and do you have any type of VLAN's set up or in use for your home lab environment? If you could provide a bit more information, maybe I can help. Basically when I ping the management address (in this case 192.168.1.20) which is assigned to vmnic01 (which is the onboard nic)... I was thinking that it could be an issue with the switch environment I have. I have a unmanaged HP procurve switch that I have been using as my core, and have some various little 10 port unmanaged switches around the house. I was thinking it could possibly be a vlan issue, but ESXi isn't setup to use a default vlan on the management interface. My gateway is currently just a crummy linksys router that I was going to replace with an asa5505 but I lost my job where I got stuff at 70% under cost ... I was thinking about setting up another box as a router (using an open source solution) and move the router just to being a bridged AP, but I am running out of hardware lol... I eliminated the router and switches from the environment, and just did a straight connection from my notebook to the machine and was still unable to get responses, or even access the http site... What I find funny is the intel nic which I installed (while it is an older 10/100pro) should work by default and is on the esxi HCL from my understanding. Yet ESXi doesn't detect that NIC as a device that can be used as a management port. I didn't know you could nest it within Workstation.... My main desktop has 16gb ram and a sandy bridge I am sure I could make it work through workstation, then maybe use the other box as a SAN device (using FreeNAS or openfiller) I do have a few servers though that I wanted to have on a separate physical host however.. There is some stuff I run from home, such as a ventrillo server for gaming, occassionally a game server or two, etc.... Share this post Link to post Share on other sites More sharing options...
Lackadaisical Posted May 13, 2012 Posted May 13, 2012 Well it sounds like you definitely had quite a bit going on there, but I see that you did try to remove those extra variables by connecting directly. When you did the direct computer -- computer connection did you use a crossover cable? Another thing to double check is to make sure that when you configure the management network, the vlan is set to 0, this should be the default value, and it is what you want if you are not actually doing any vlans. Have you tried hooking just the esxi host up to your linksys router by itself? Hell if you want l would even restore to factory default on your esxi host, and let it attempt to grab an ip through dhcp. If you get absolutely nothing with that set up it is definitely some kind of hardware issue going on. It may be that the NIC itself is on the HCL, but the rest of your hardware is not so it might be hitting a roadblock due to the motherboard, or any number of things really. Can you tell me exactly what version of code you have running? (I just a full upgrade to 5.0 in the server in environment and that was using the latest code...but once again servers are very different than desktops, even in that situation I had to use a custom esxi iso with the correct drivers for my lab servers (Cisco UCS). You can definitely run VM's nested on your sandybridge pretty damn well with with 16GB, I know I have personally had quite a few going at once. The boot times will be a bit poor but other than that once things are up they seem perfectly fine. I run my setup on an i7 2600k with 16GB, and the the bottle neck is always memory usage and hard drive I/O. Throwing all my VM's on a RAID0 array showed quite a performance boost as well. My home lab is far from ideal too, I have yet to actually have to time to even setup my ASA 5505, and I am waiting on getting a manged switch, for now I'm just using a cheap 1GB 8 port switch to connect my setup which has a aged Netgear router acting as the gateway. You would be surprised what you can do with relatively limited amount of things. Best advice if you plan on trying to do esxi on workstation is to make sure you set the network to be bridged. I have found that the NAT and other options just do not cut it (so I currently have 3 NIC's because I have VM's for esxi, vcenter, and openfiler which I run in workstation. Everything else gets thrown on my esxi VM. Let me know if you have luck with the physical esxi box, and if any of my suggestions did anything useful. Feel free to ask any other questions and I'll try to help you if I can. Hell, I have a Vmware VCP 5 bootcamp coming up in another week, maybe that may add some knowledge to the table that might help Share this post Link to post Share on other sites More sharing options...
Lackadaisical Posted June 1, 2012 Posted June 1, 2012 Well, I just finished the bootcamp for VMware 5.0... To be honest it's actually quite worthless for anyone who is already familiar with the technology. I don't recommend it unless you just need it for the certification track (or are completely new to vmware and have a lot of money to burn). I took it just so I can get the certification, thankfully I didn't have to pay for it myself. Anyway, I was just wondering if you made any progress with your setup or if you were still having the same issues. I'm still willing to help if you want to revisit it again Share this post Link to post Share on other sites More sharing options...
greengiant912 Posted June 12, 2012 Posted June 12, 2012 So I booted the box up tonight, and played a round with it. Trying different vlan options and still wasn't able to get it up and running Share this post Link to post Share on other sites More sharing options...
Lackadaisical Posted June 14, 2012 Posted June 14, 2012 Why are you messing around with VLAN options when you are in an environment without VLANs? Just leave it set to 0, if that doesn't work nothing else will either, unless you are now using a managed switch with VLANs configured? The problem is more likely related to a HW issue/compatibility rather than any network issue (as I doubt you missed any of the really basic options needed for simple management connectivity). Oddly enough I managed to get ESXi 5 running on a lenovo thinkpad 510, booting from a USB drive that I had installed ESXi to. I could not believe that worked, yet the same USB stick failed to recognize NIC's on a few other desktop systems that I had tried. It's very hit or miss as far as I can tell. This was running build 623860, which is what I'm running for everything at this point. Share this post Link to post Share on other sites More sharing options...
greengiant912 Posted June 23, 2012 Posted June 23, 2012 I tried setting it so that all vlans were available there is an option to force from what I read. Didn't work anyways. I think I will just pick up a better NIC card once I find a job :-\ this whole not working thing has me pretty low on the funds... Share this post Link to post Share on other sites More sharing options...
greengiant912 Posted September 5, 2012 Posted September 5, 2012 (edited) So I ordered a NIC last night, and hopefully that will resolve my issues. I was reading this, and it looks like the only issue others have had is with the sata drivers...http://communities.vmware.com/message/976856#976856 Edited September 5, 2012 by greengiant912 Share this post Link to post Share on other sites More sharing options...
Lackadaisical Posted September 5, 2012 Posted September 5, 2012 I've been doing a lot more labbing/installs lately, and I have seen quite a bit of random issues. Usually it is related to the storage controllers, but I have a few systems with "approved" NIC's that just refuse to work as well. That being said I have also gotten it to work on a fair amount on non certified hardware. My best advice is to just download the latest release of the hypervisor and run with it. Hopefully the new NIC sorts out the issues you were running in to, and unless you are actively using vlans in your home environment you should have that set to the default of 0 in ESXi. Share this post Link to post Share on other sites More sharing options...
greengiant912 Posted September 7, 2012 Posted September 7, 2012 Success! The NIC did the trick! Hopefully I don't have any issues with the SATA controller now... I have a hard drive hooked up locally until I can afford a decent network solution Share this post Link to post Share on other sites More sharing options...
Nerm Posted September 8, 2012 Posted September 8, 2012 My gateway is currently just a crummy linksys router that I was going to replace with an asa5505 but I lost my job where I got stuff at 70% under cost ... I was thinking about setting up another box as a router (using an open source solution) and move the router just to being a bridged AP, but I am running out of hardware lol... I know I am going a little off topic here but if you want an inexpensive router with all the big boy features (dynamic routing protocols, SLA, VRRP, etc) then take a look at Mikrotik. Share this post Link to post Share on other sites More sharing options...
Recommended Posts
Please sign in to comment
You will be able to leave a comment after signing in
Sign In Now