VMware vSphere woes
June 13, 2009 – 3:34 pmI decided to upgrade my 2 servers to ESX 4, since I’ll have to write the exam by year end, might as well get familiar with it
I run 2 ESX boxes, with about 10 workloads split between them. So first, I moved all my workloads to a single server, rebooted on the ESX CD and started a fresh install. The system has 3 NICs, 2 Intel PRO/1000 PT adapters and an on-board Intel gigabit NIC. The on-board one never worked, so no big deal.
ESX 4 detects all of them! Yeah! I’m happy! For a short period of time, until I realise that while it sees all 3 adapters, it doesn’t see that the link is up on 2 of them (the on board and one of the PT cards).
So one of the PT adapters is working, not the other one. Odd?! I know it’s not hardware related, it worked in 3.5 30 mins ago so…
After much experimenting and searching, I decided to do what anyone would do: I quit searching. It’s not on the HCL so it’ll never work. I then decide (just for fun) to install ESXi 4. Same driver base (I assumed) so I should get the same results.
Well guess what. All 3 adapters work! Properly! So I finished installing it, moved all my workloads to the new ESXi 4 box and proceeded to do the same to the 2nd server. But I HAD to try ESX one more time
On this second, IDENTICAL server, 2 of the NICs worked, not the on-board. Makes no sense to get different results on identically configured, same BIOS rev, same everything. Anyway, I installed ESXi on this box as well and all is good in my lab now.
Better than running trial versions of ESX anyway. I do have a 3rd system that I’ll try to get running with ESX as I’ll need at least one running instance for training…

