One of my older homelab hosts has been chugging along for a few years now. The Lenovo Thinkcentre M75q Gen 2 has served me well, and while most of the components are supported in 7.0 and even 8.0, I had to stay on 6.7 due to the fact that it had an onboard Realtek 8111 network adapter. Other boxes that I have with the same issue have worked with the community driver and USB network adapters, and at one point I had 10Gbe networking through an M.2 to PCI-e x4 adapter.
Earlier this week, William Lam announced that the Realtek network driver fling had been released. This opens the door to update the M75q to 8.0 without having additional hardware hanging off the back. In this instance, I want to build an image that injects the driver into the update bundle. Here are the steps I took to do so:
Prerequisites:
- PowerCLI 13.x (VCF PowerCli is more current but will address the legacy use later)
- ESXi-Customizer-PS script
- ESXi 8.0 Update 3e free edition (or a depot of your preferred version)
At first, I tried using VCF PowerCli as it's easy to install within PowerShell. I updated the ESXi-Customizer-PS script to reference it, but when trying to build the image, it kept giving me an error saying "node doesn't share the same root with the depot file". The same thing happened when trying to use the official method with Export-ESXImageProfile. Switching back to the legacy PowerCli worked, so if you run into issues, try reverting to the older version.
From there, I put my depot and script into a folder, and created another named "Realtek" one level down. I put the Realtek driver fling in the Realtek folder, and ran the following command:
- .\ESXi-Customizer-PS.ps1 -izip .\Depot-name.zip -pkgDir .\Realtek -ozip
The only thing left to do is install the update and remove the legacy Realtek driver. I uploaded the newly created depot to the datastore of the 6.7 host, and went for a profile update. Before I could proceed, I needed to remove the legacy Realtek driver:
- esxcli software vib remove -n net55-r8168
Next:
- esxcli software sources profile list -d /vmfs/volumes/datastore1/Depot.zip
Where Depot.zip is the name of the uploaded file. Make note of the profile, then:
- esxcli software profile update -d /vmfs/volumes/datastore1/Depot.zip -p (name of profile noted in last step)
Once complete, reboot. I was able to confirm that the if-re driver was operational:
