Installing ESXi Drivers

Prerequisites for Installing ESX Drivers

Ensure that you adhere to the following best practice for installing the drivers. Upgrade the infrastructure in the following order before installing or upgrading the drivers.

  • Upgrade the infrastructure firmware which includes the UCS Manager, the Fabric Interconnects, and the chassis I/O Modules.

  • Upgrade the server and adapter firmware.

You can use a virtual media image in place of the physical media. You will need to create a custom ISO using vSphere ESXi Image Builder or other third party tools, then boot from this custom ISO image and proceed with installation. Cisco can also provide a custom ISO with custom drivers.


Caution

Failure to adhere to the proper upgrade sequence can cause the server to crash.

Installing ESXi Drivers

You can use this procedure to install offline bundles that are copied from the driver ISO image to the ESXi host.

Procedure

Step 1

Extract the contents of the ISO image to the ESXi host.

Step 2

Identify the offline-bundle.zip file containing the eNIC or fNIC driver being installed.

Step 3

Log into the ESXi host using the vSphere Client with administrator privileges, such as root.

Step 4

Using DataStore Browser, upload the offline-bundle.zip file to the ESXi host's datastore.

Step 5

Enter the host into maintenance mode.

Step 6

Log into the ESXi console as root through SSH or iLO/DRAC.

Step 7

Copy the offline-bundle.zip file to a datastore accessible by the ESXi host by running this command:

cp offline-bundle.zip /vmfs/volumes/datastore_name

Step 8

Run the following command to install drivers using the offline bundle. An absolute path is required to run this command.

esxcli software vib install –d /path/offline-bundle.zip

For example:esxcli software vib install -d /vmfs/volumes/datastore_name/offline_bundle.zip
Step 9

You can run the following command to check that the VMware vSphere Installation Bundle(VIB) is installed successfully:

esxcli software vib list | grep -i vib_name
Step 10

Restart the host.

Step 11

Exit maintenance mode.

Updating ESXi Drivers

You can use this procedure to install offline bundles that were copied from the driver ISO image to the ESXi host.

Procedure

Step 1

Extract the contents of the ISO image to the ESXi host.

Step 2

Identify the offline-bundle.zip file containing the eNIC or fNIC driver being installed.

Step 3

Log into the ESXi host using the vSphere Client with administrator privileges, such as root.

Step 4

Using DataStore Browser, upload the offline-bundle.zip file to the ESXi host's datastore.

Step 5

Enter the host into maintenance mode.

Step 6

Log into the ESXi console as root through SSH or iLO/DRAC.

Step 7

Copy the offline-bundle.zip file to a datastore accessible by the ESXi host using the following command:

cp offline-bundle.zip /vmfs/volumes/datastore_name
Step 8

Run the following command to install drivers using the offline bundle. An absolute path is required to run this command.

esxcli software vib update -d /path/offline-bundle.zip

For example:esxcli software vib update -d /vmfs/volumes/datastore_name/offline-bundle.zip
Step 9

You can run the following command to check that the VMware vSphere Installation Bundle(VIB) is installed successfully:

esxcli software vib list | grep -i vib_name
Step 10

Exit maintenance mode.