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Cannot See Network During Installation on Servers with Broadcom BCM5700 10/100/1000 NIC

Details

I cannot see the network when installing ESX Server on my x440 server with a Planar Broadcom BCM5700 10/100/1000 NIC. I want to dedicate the Broadcom NIC to my virtual machines. What is wrong?

Solution

To configure a server with an integrated Broadcom Gigabit adapter to use the Planar Broadcom Gigabit Ethernet Adapter for the virtual machines, perform the following actions:

  1. Disable the Planar Broadcom NIC in the BIOS upon bootup of the initial install. That way, the networking installation uses the eePro 100 NIC as eth0. (Note: If the PCI NIC is in a PCI-X slot, you will have to move the NIC to a slot that is non PCI-X.)

  2. After rebooting the ESX Server, assign devices to the Service Console through the secondary portion of the install. After the PCIDivvy portion is run, reboot the server. At this point, enable the Planar Broadcom Gigabit adapter in the BIOS.

  3. You can either run through the installation wizard now and go back to PCIDivvy and assign the adapter to the virtual machines; or, after complete system configuration, go to the "Update Boot Configuration Allocate Devices" section in Configure System and assign the adapter to the virtual machines.

This will allow your virtual machines to see the adapter as a vmnic device.

Keywords

880; x400

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