If you are not sure what your CD-ROM label is, you find out by running:.

In my instance my CD-ROM mount path was /vmfs/volumes/DOWNLOADS

Once successful, your CD-ROM will be mounted with the path of /vmfs/volumes/.

Note: If this doesn’t work try the other CDROMs from step 6 sbin/vsish -e set /vmkModules/iso9660/mount mpx.vmhba33:C0:T0:L0

Mount the ISO so that you can access the driver files, by running the following:.

Note: You might see multiple results – document all of them.

Write down the results as you will need this later on.

List all of the CD-ROMs available to ESXi by running.

If you don’t have an ISO file you can create one using the Img Burn software

Using your out-of-band management attach the ISO that contains the drivers.

From the DCUI, press Alt+F1 to access the ESXi Shell.

From the menu, select Troubleshooting Options.

Enter your root credentials when prompted.

From the DCUI, press F2 to customise the system.

Here are the steps I took to resolve my issue: If you have network access to your host, then you could simply do the install via SSH, following a similar process to the steps below but instead of mounting an ISO you could simply copy the drivers to the local datastore or something like that. I had to do it this way as I didn’t have network access to the host (other than via out-of-band management).

The following steps document how to install drivers into an ESXi host using the ESXi Shell from the DCUI. I went with option 2, however if you want to know how to create your own ESXi custom image, then I have documented it here > How To – Create custom VMware ESXi Image How To – Install drivers in an ESXi host Manually install the drivers via the DCUI.Create a custom ESXi image with the correct drivers injected and then rebuild the host using the custom ESXi installer image.Once ESXi was built, I went to configure the Management Network, however there were no connected NICs in the network adapter settings of the Configure Management Network section in the DCUI. In this instance however, I did have onboard NICs available, however in my environment these are not being used and hence had not been patched. Normally if you don’t have a NIC driver, the installation will fail as it won’t detect a network card. The specific card I was using was a QLogic QLE8262 CNA.

Recently I was building an ESXi host that used a CNA (Converged Network Adapter) for all network and storage, including for the management network. If you need to install drivers in an ESXi host, this is how you do it:

Esxi driver build