Followup note on the onboard 8168 nic for the GA-MA78GM-US2H.

It turns out that I had a lot of problems with this nic. Very unusual though. Every function from the VMware Infrastructure Client worked fine. A Redhat ES5 vm worked fine (web browsing w/Mozilla, etc.) However, with vms for Windows Server 2008 and Windows 7 RC, both gave IE errors such as "Method not allowed" no matter what website I went to. However, ping worked fine, even to the outside world (www.google.com). I finally threw in an old 3C905c 3com card and all my problems went away.

I saw someone request earlier that jens incorporate the latest 8168 drivers. Maybe if that happens it will improve.

Did you see this post? viewtopic.php?f=8&t=112

I'm really glad to see there is some progress here.

I have an ASUS M4A78-E / 8GB Corsair DDR2 / AMD Phenom II 9950 Quad 2.6Gz

I've had to go to the 3Ware controller for the Raid arrays but I'd love to support the 1002:4391 ATI Sata controller. Once booted ESXi can't even see the Sata CDROM drive. I'd love to be able to just access the CDROM drive and maybe a single drive here and there.

I haven't seen anyone mention having compiled a driver so it'll take someone to be the first.

Hello all. I just joined this forum for this particular topic. I have a machine with a GA-MA78GM-US2H MB in it. I need to get VMWare 3.5 update 4 installed on this machine. After VMWare is working I need to migrate( P2V) a CENTOS 4.4 OS that is running an application used for a feature in a company's phone system. I don't have a lot of time to go through the steps that many of you have taken to get this working. Could someone post a link to an ISO that I can download and use to get this up and running quickly? I appologize for asking so much right off the bat. But, i'm in a bit of a pinch.

thank you,

I don't have an ISO prepared that way myself, but if you look at this script it will take care of creating the ISO for you.

viewtopic.php?f=7&t=4&p=594#p594

I just don't have time to dig into all of that. There is no OS on this box now. I just need to get vmware working quickly. The reason is that this is a temporary box. We are going to migrate a centos OS into vmware on this box to test if it will run correctly. If it runs correctly we will do it on the production box which is a Dell Server. I can't spend a lot of time working on making VMWare work because 1) this is temporary even if I do get it working. 2) Any time I spend trying to get VMware working will be non-billable time.
They have provided me with this hardware as a test box. I would like to get it working according to the plan. If it won't work then they may just pull the plug on the whole project. Because, they are not likely going to buy new hardware just for this test. So if I could get a modified VMware 3.5 installation ISO that works with this particular mother board that would be great. I might even be willing to compensate someone for it if it works quickly and easily.

I hate for my first post to be a flame, but guys like "iristech" make me nuts! "I don't have time to do the work to get this done, but you guys do, so..." - whatever.

Anyway, I first want to say thanks for your knowledge sharing on all of this stuff - simply amazing! I too am trying to get esxi 3.5 R4 up and running on this board to no avail. I used the method that "rkroehl" used on page 3 of this thread, along with Jen's oem.tgz file. The distro that I used for the ISO recompile is Oracle Enterprise Linux x64, which is basically a hack of RHEL. The installer loads but my controller is still not identified. I'm wondering if I folded the oem.tgz properly. Is there any way to verify that I have the correct info in the file? Any help/info would be greatly appreciated. Looking forward to toying with this!

Cheers,
Dave

Hi Dave, you can try to load the driver manually. When you do so, it'll enumerate all PCI devices to see which it can work with so you don't have to worry about having simple.map correct.

You'll run the command vmkload_mod /mod/<driver> so something like vmkload_mod /mod/e1000e.o just substituting the right driver name.

If everything loads OK, then you can run esxcfg-nics -l and the NIC should be listed there. If not, then you'll need to look at /var/log/messages for any errors (look at the last 20 lines or so.

Thanks for the fast response Dave. I'll give it a shot a.s.a.p.

Cheers,
Dave