intel 82584L onboard NIC2 doesnt show up (work)

[nedergah]

Hi

I'm not much of a linux guy, so I'm completely lost here. :smileyconfused:

I have just set up a new ESXi 5.0 U1 on a new Fujitsu PRIMERGY TX100 S3, this server has two onboard NICs 82584L - only one shows up in the management configuration on the server, and I'm unable to add the 2nd NIC in vSphere.

Both NICs are enabled in BIOS an both are having link on the LED's.

As a test I have added a PCIe dual NIC card - which shows up just fine both in management network configuration and in the vSpHere client.

I have tried to use the command lspci -p and only 3 NIC's are displayed (of course).

Does anybody have any suggestions on what to do?

I have attached a log export - just in case anybody know what on eath it sayes :smileylaugh:

[logiboy123]

On the surface of things it sounds like a dodgey NIC.

I would install a different OS on the server to confirm if something like Windows Server can see all NICs. If it can then it may be some sort of driver issue.

Regards,

Paul

[zXi_Gamer]

I had similiar issue with onboard nics and turned out that the interrupts of the second nic was shared across the hba in the server. I reassgined a new interrupt in the bios and both the nics showed up in the ESX.

[Zhuominchen]

It turns out that TX100 S3 has two different NICs

Intel 82574L, Intel 82579LM

and vmware driver for Intel 82574L works, but Intel 82579LM does not work.

I thought Primerygy TX100 S3 was best design. This two Nic design is not so smart.  

[Zhuominchen]

OK, finally get it second nic working for TX100 S3 now

steps

1) read through 

http://www.vm-help.com/forum/viewtopic.php?p=13438#p13438

2) download  tgz file from

http://dl.dropbox.com/u/27246203/E1001E.tgz

3) convert tgz file to vib format

http://esxi-customizer.v-front.de/

4) upload vib into ESXI hosting server

5)  go into maintaince mode

6)  esxcli software acceptance set --level=CommunitySupported

7)  esxcli software vib install -v /path/e1000e-1.0.x86_64.vib

😎 after installation, reboot ESXI server

Now you should see  both   82574L and 82579LM  on-board nic shown on ESXI 5.0

[nedergah]

That is really good news, thank you very much for sharing you findings. I'm not much of a linux guy so I will have to take a deep breath before I plung in this procedure :smileylaugh:

I'll get back an confirm this solution.

Thanks again

Henrik

[ChipUser]

Hello everybody!

I just bought a Primergy TX-100 S3  from Newegg.  I am planning to use it to play with and gain some understanding of VMware Hypervisors.  So far I have only seen negative comments about installing  ESXi 5.0 on this server.  It is good to know that somebody else has  already done this.

If you don't mind, may I ask if you used the Fujitsu disks to get started or just booted with a VMware CD?  Do I need to go through any preparatory steps?  Any tips for a first successful install of the ESXi 5.0?  My search for the TX-100 S3 only brought up this thread.  I am sure even the information here will be handy for my NICs.  Thnaks in advance.

I do have networking background & have worked with Novell NetWare & MS OSes before - just no background of virtualization.  Hoping to fix that aspect soon.

[Zhuominchen]

I installed Vmware original ESXI 5.0. And I just updated my machine with Fujitsu's ESXI 5.0 off-line upgrade zip to get to latest build.

Either way, they will not fix your NIC problem, since the second nic is different type from first one.

Other than this, this machine is best one (using only 40 watts) for me. And extremely quiet (vs Dell PE T110 II) under 110 F hot weather.

And it will use cheap memorys as well , although it will warn you.  

[ChipUser]

Thanks for a quick response.  When you say it will use cheap memory, are you referring to non-ECC memory?  Have you tried using that?

[Zhuominchen]

I mixed the on-board 1X4GB with 3 X 2 GB (ECC , old leftovers from Dell machines).

If you buy memory now, ECC and NON-ECC almost same prices.

Try yourself

https://www.memory-up.com/

Jimmy

[ChipUser]

Don't mean to cause a thread creep but this is the only thread on Primergy TX-100 S3; so more likely to get noticed by those who have worked with it.

I was able to load ESXi 5.0 only after changing the SATA controler mode to AHCI (from RAID).  Trying to install in the RAID mode was resulting in failure of the drive on which it was installed.  Has anybody succeded in installing ESXi 5.0 with the TX-100 S3 in RAID mode?  How did you do it?

If I have more questions, I will start a new thread.  Thanks.

[Zhuominchen]

Sorry I should have included the details.

Primergy TX100 S3 comes with on-board BIOS Raid-controller (using CPU)

or you may pay extra to get optional Hardware Raid-Controller. 

In may case (I paid $299 from tiger.com) BIOS raid Controller, Vmware ESXI 5.0 will NOT see/work

with BIOS raid controller (for all computers),  so I have to only use AHCI (Raid Mode is useless).

BTW: If you install Suse Linux on it, it will work with BIOS raid controller.

It makes sense for you to deploy 4 Sata disks, and distribute your guests evenly.

[nedergah]

I can confirm that RAID on the motherboard SATA controller is NOT with ESXi. So no RAID for me

While we are at it - I also didn't succeed upgrading the server to 32gb memory, I just couldn't find any RAM modules that worked on this motherboard, så 16gb is the max I was able to get to work. Oh, there was some 8gb modules which was listed but at a hopeless price 3 times the price of the server.

[Zhuominchen]

New ESXI 5.1 just released on Sept 10,2012, still does not support driver for 82579LM.  

If you patched ESXI 5.0 , trying to do in-place upgrade to ESXI 5.1, this will fail.

Trying to boot to CD with ESXI 5.1 with full installation, when prompted for location, choose same OS

drive as ESXI 5.0 with "Preserve partition" to preseve your data. 

[ogboot]

Figured i'd bump this one. Recently applied december's patch and it still did not provide support for the 82579LM, but it did include updates to net-igbe among others (e1000, etc).

[Withy14]

Hi, this might be outdated but in case someone wants tot solve this I have one small information to add. After trying several Intel drivers I found that even if the network card is shown as Intel the MAC address which is burned into the chip belongs to Fujitsu so I am asuming that ESXi cannot be fooled this way and therefore cannot install this card. I will try to search for more clues.

Update: Ok, I found the solution on the net.

Here are the steps to enabale the Intel NIC 82579LM:

Download the alternate driver for Intel NIC e1000 (82579LM) here.

http://shell.peach.ne.jp/~aoyama/wordpress/download/net-e1000e-2.1.4.x86_64.vib

Connect to your ESXi box using the vSphere client.

Using the datastore browser on your vSphere client, upload the alternate Intel NIC Driver to your datastore.

Enable SSH on your ESXi box.

Connect to your ESXi box using a SSH client (putty)

Move the custom Intel driver package to /tmp directory:

cd /tmp

mv /vmfs/volumes/my-datastore/net-e1000e-2.1.4.x86_64.vib /tmp

Please note that it does not have to be in /tmp but escxli needs to have absolute paths (if you use relative it will start from /var/log/. or something like this)

Please shutdown properly any guests your ESXi is running

For installing the vib package put the ESXi in maintenance mode:

esxcli system maintenanceMode set -e true -t 0

Set the host acceptance level to CommunitySupported:

esxcli software acceptance set --level=CommunitySupported

Install the vib package:

esxcli software vib install -v /tmp/net-e1000e-2.1.4.x86_64.vib

Exit the ESXi from maintenance mode:

esxcli system maintenanceMode set -e false -t 0

Reboot the server. I tested this on both 5.0U3 and 5.5 but from my point of view 5.0 is way better and stable for this driver (not to mention that 5.5 seems to me big downgrade). ANyway if you have servers with this ethernet cards in production I would not recommend these cards.