Hello

I've recently purchased the Asus P5BV-C/4L and decided to try out ESXi on it.

I Browsed this page as i did plenty of times before when looking for whitebox hardware, and found an announcement saying that vmware had implemented the sky2 driver in ESXi.

My board has 4 x Marvell 88E8056 onboard NIC's which are supported by the sky2 driver in linux, now according to this the default simple.map in ESXi does not include the PCI ID of my NIC's, so i verified the PCI ID of my NIC's which according to lspci is "11ab:4364" made a custom oem.tgz with the modified simple.map and embedded it in the imagedd and also placed it in the root of my installation media.

Now the problem is i get the familiar "vmkctl.HostCtlException: Unable to load module /usr/lib/vmware/vmkmod/vmfs3: Failure" error, which I've found out, through various forums, is normally a sign of unsupported hardware, i can see during the boot up of the ESXi installation that it loads the sky2 module but still as soon as i accept the EULA the installation terminates with the above error.

I hope someone has experience with this board or some solution other than the obvious one of installing Intel PCI NIC's

Regards
Martin

When you get the error you can
1) press ALT+f1 and login with root (blank password)
2) run lspci -p -- is a module listed for the NIC?

You can also check /var/log/messages for errors.

first of thanks for your fast reply Dave.

Sadly no module is loaded for the NIC's and the log is full of errors regarding the sky2 module follow a snippet from a load



these lines are replicated 4 times in the log one for each NIC, so i guess the simple.map is correct as it tries to load the sky2 driver, but making much sense out of the above is a bit beyond my understanding.

Regards
Martin

You might want to get the source for the driver and see if your specific model of NIC is supported. VMware tends to lag a bit behind on the release that they use for their drivers.

Once again you where correct Dave, the 1.20 is too old for anything above 88E8055

I compiled my own version of sky2 from the 2.6.29 kernel sourcetree, and it works now, i will upload a working oem.tgz later today when i get back from work.

I have attached the oem file containing the sky2 ver 1.22 driver this makes my board fully functional and i was able to install ESXi 4.1

Any way to install this driver on ESX 4.1 (not ESXi). I can't seem to find a way online. Googled for a few hours...Nothing.

hi martin how can i get your oem driver version to work on my ESX4.1i usb stick i can acces with winscp but i am stuck there... SORRY I AM A NOOB

> hi martin how can i get your oem driver version to work on my ESX4.1i usb stick i can acces with winscp but i am stuck there

Rename the download to oem.tgz and then copy it via scp to /bootbank and /altbootbank. If you are already using an oem.tgz file then you need to merge the results.

and again NOT working -> boot image corrupt what do i do wrong...tried zo much already