vSphere ISO containing Intel 82575 and 82576 Gigabit Ethernet Adapter drivers

By Arne Fokkema - ICT-Freak.nl

This post is a complete re-post from Eric Sarakaitis blog: http://www.vmwareadmins.com

So, after spending three days on this, I was finally able to get the  Intel 82575 and 82576 Gigabit Ethernet Adapter driver slipstreamed onto the installation media.

I first followed this: http://patrickvanbeek.wordpress.com/2010/01/30/slipstreaming-drivers-in-the-esx4i-install-iso/ to get the post install drivers working.

But I still had the problem of not being able to see the NIC’s during the install.

to do that, I had to explode the ESX 4.0u1 ISO and grab the initrd.img file from the isolinux folder.

To do the modifications of the img file I needed a linux guest… so I fired up a Ubuntu image on Lab Manager and SCP’d the img file there.

To extract the IMG file do:

1.mkdir ~/tmp
2.cd ~/tmp
3.cp /boot/initrd.img ./initrd.gz
4.gunzip initrd.gz
5.mkdir tmp2
6.cd tmp2
7.cpio -id < ../initrd.img

now you should have a lot of files in ~/tmp/tmp2 directories, including a lot of subdirectories like sbin,lib

Now you need to extract the igb.xml and igb.o from the VMware RPM (http://www.vmware.com/support/vsphere4/doc/drivercd/esx40-net-igb_400.1.3.19.12-1.0.4.html.)

I then moved these files to their respective locations within the exploded initrd.

the igb.xml went into

1./usr/share/hwdata/pciids/

the igb.o went into

1./usr/lib/vmware/vmkmod/

then pack the files back into the archive using the following command

1.cd ~/tmp/tmp2
2.find . | cpio –create –format=’newc’ > ~/tmp/newinitrd
3.cd ~/tmp
4.gzip newinitrd

now you would have a newinitrd.gz
rename this now –
mv newinitrd.gz as newinitrd.img
this is the new boot image now !!

I then re-created the ISO. Oddly enough, it worked on the first try

and the link to the ISO… http://www.vmwareadmins.com