Intel Server Board S3420GPC Network Card not found 해결

In my home lab I have a Intel S3420GPLC motherboard with Intel Xeon X3430.

Intel S3420GPLC is a pretty good motherboard. The motherboard has 2 on-board network interface cards (Intel 82574L & Intel 82578DM). The Intel NIC 82574L along with the onboard SATA controller is on the VMware HCL. So basically VMware ESXi 4.1 installs without any problems. However the Intel NIC 82578DM is an unsupported one, so cannot be used out of the box.

I wanted to use both the onboard network cards for my test lab, hence Googled around for some information. Thanks to the folks at vm-help.com, I found out it can be enabled by by using a custom OEM.tgz. I followed the steps as listed at vm-help and it worked perfect.

Here are the exact steps that I did to enable the card:

1. Install vSphere ESXi-4.1 on a USB. BTW as my ‘Intel S3420GP’ board has a internal-onboard USB slot, I use it for connecting USB stick installed with ESXi. Thus no dangling USB sticks on the outside.
2. PowerOn the ESXi box.
3. Enable SSH on your ESXi box.
4. Connect to your ESXi box using a SSH client.
5. Before we proceed further, We need to download a vmkernel module to enable the Intel 82578DM based NIC. A kind & helpful contributor has done all the hardwork of compiling a custom module. It can be downloaded at vm-help forums. Download the module named oem-8086-10f0-v1119.tgz.
6. Extract the module from the tarball. You will need only the file name as e1000e2.o.
7. Copy this module to the ESXi box under /tmp.
8. Run the following commands:

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   mkdir /tmp/oem cd /tmp/oem mkdir -p etc/vmware mkdir -p mkdir usr/lib/vmware/vmkmod cp /etc/vmware/simple.map /tmp/oem/etc/vmware cp /etc/vmware/pci.ids /tmp/oem/etc/vmware # we had copied this module earlier in step 7. cp /tmp/e1000e2.o /tmp/oem/usr/lib/vmware/vmkmod

9. In vi, open the following file

   1	/tmp/oem/etc/vmware/simple.map

   Search for the line

   1	8086:10ec 0000:0000 network ixgbe

   Add the following line below it

   1	8086:10ef 0000:0000 network e1000e2

   Save the file and close it.

10. In vi, open the following file

    1	/tmp/oem/etc/vmware/pci.ids

    Search for the section

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    10ec  82598EB 10 Gigabit AT CX4 Network Connection                 8086 a01f  10-Gigabit CX4 Dual Port Server Adapter                 8086 a11f  10-Gigabit CX4 Dual Port Server Adapter

    If it does not already exists, then add the following line below it

    1	10ef  82578DM Gigabit Network Connection

11. Now lets create custom oem.tgz and copy it to the appropriate location. The commands that we will run are:

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    cd /tmp/oem tar zcvf oem.tgz etc usr cp oem.tgz /bootbank/oem.tgz reboot

12. Thats all, after reboot, just verify if your NIC card was detected.

PS: I would like to specially mention that all I have done here is just documented the steps more clearly. The real hardwork of hacking into the ESXi and figuring out the jigsaw puzzle was done by Dave Mishchenko of the vm-help.com, and these steps are based on the information found over there.

A Quick Update:

You don’t require to do any of the steps described above if you are running the recently released vSphere 5.0. vSphere 5.0 includes a driver for Intel 82578DM.

You can download the latest vSphere (5.0) hypervisor version here.