RHEL 5 kickstart on ESX (vmxnet3 driver)
Has anyone figured out how to get the necessary VMware modules added to a RHEL 5 boot iso to recognize the Network Interfaces (vmxnet3)? The documentation I found on the web was not helpful - so, I wanted to reach out to a group of people I trust ;-)
Unfortunately we cannot implement PXE/tfptboot in our environment, so our routine involves a boot iso created from our kickstart tree.
Recently VMware apparently has removed the e1000 NIC option from ESX? So - we are pretty much unable to build/kickstart hosts from our boot iso now.
Responses
Guru
2135 points
This would be a killer for me too. Is it even feasible to have the vmxnet drivers added to the RHEL5 kernel like the RHEL6 solution?
Whilst we are still mixing RHEL 5 & 6 guests, we end up with a mixture of e1000 & vmxnet interfaces on the RHEL 6 guests as the Admin's forget to use the correct device sometimes.
Red Hat
Active Contributor
282 points
Please read the following article
https://access.redhat.com/site/solutions/53299
It is too bad that VMWare removed the emulated 82545EM (e1000 device) from the list of emulated devices. It is extremely unlikely that RHEL5 will ever have native support for vmxnet3. Are you able to switch and use the support for emulated 82574 which requires the e1000e driver for your RHEL5 and RHEL6 guests?
Guru
6863 points
Sorry for the late response. We (Linux Team) do not manage the VMware ENV and basically have to accept what is provided. I interpreted their stance as there is no longer the e1000 support in their environment (but I don't know that for certain).
RHEL 6 is actually OK out of the box, no updates are needed.
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