Version 12 of Veeam B&R is nearly here
if you haven’t registered yet: https://go.veeam.com/v12
and so is our desire to try it in our homelab and play with it in the evening, after dinner. It may happen that we dust off an old workstation with enough resources but one or more Realtek network cards.
If we install Hyper-V, everything will almost certainly go smoothly.
And in case we wanna install a VMware ESXi solution? Well… We gonna have some headache, thanks to the lack of official support for that hardware. In fact it’s common that network cards remain offline.
This mini guide can come to your rescue.
You need at least 1 network card operative.
If you already have the necessary .vib
- Create a datastore and upload the VIB on your host.
- Enable SSH on ESXi and connect via Putty
- Set the vib acceptance level to “Community supported”
esxcli software acceptance set –level=CommunitySupported - Install vib
esxcli software vib install -v /vmfs/volumes/datastore_name/package_name.vib - Reboot host
After that, you can check list of installed VIBs on your ESXi host with this command:
- Esxcli software vib list
Ok Marco, but what’s about if I haven’t relative .vib or it’s corrupted or I got an error while installing it? This helpful repository come to our rescue:
https://vibsdepot.v-front.de/wiki/index.php/Welcome
If you don’t have the necessary .vib
- Enable SSH on ESXi and connect via Putty
- Set the vib acceptance level to “Community supported”
esxcli software acceptance set –level=CommunitySupported -
Pull .vib to your host
esxcli software vib install -n package_name -d https://vibsdepot.v-front.de - Reboot host
And if there’s no working nc at starting?
There’s a third solution, by customize ESXi iso:
https://www.v-front.de/p/esxi-customizer-ps.html
Thanks to:
https://www.vladan.fr/realtek-8169-nics-not-detected-under-esxi-5-5/
