As part of upgrading my personal vSphere home lab from an to an Intel NUC (more on this in a future blog), I have been researching to see if there are other alternatives for adding an additional network adapter. The Intel NUC only includes a single built-in ethernet adapter which is similar to the Mac Mini.

However, the NUC also lacks additional IO connectors like a Thunderbolt port which the Mac Mini includes and can support a. I think this is probably the only downside to the Intel NUC platform which has been similar feedback that I have seen from other vSphere home labbers who currently use or would like to use the NUC. Perhaps, with the next update of the, the rumored Thunderbolt 3 / USB-c connector may make things easier as some of the existing vendors who produce Thunderbolt to ethernet adapter also use common drivers like the Broadcom tg3 which have historically worked with ESXi. One option that has been suggested by many folks over the years was to see if a USB based ethernet adapter could be used to provide additional networking to ESXi? Historically, the answer had been no because there were no known device drivers that would work with ESXi. I had even looked into this a few years ago and although I ran into some folks who seemed to have made it work, I was never able to find the right USB ethernet adapter to personally confirm myself. It was only until last week, I decided to start fresh again and after a bit of Googling I came across an old VMTN thread where VMTN user mentioned he had success with the and using a custom compiled driver that was posted over by another user named.

This CZUR ET16 does! I can't speak on how it does for Windows, but if it is terrific for Mac, it must be as good or better for PC Windows users. I have tried no less than a dozen other scanners over the years but none had the ability to really work with my Mac. Czur et16 plus book document scanner with smart ocr for mac mac.

UPDATE (03/29/16) - Please have a look at this updated article which includes ESXi 5.5 and 6.0 driver. Disclaimer: In case it is not clear and apparent, you should never install any unknown 3rd party software on your ESXi host as it can potentially lead to instability issues or worse open yourself to a security hole. The following solution is not officially supported by VMware, please use at your own risk. I decided to bite the bullet and give this solution a try and purchased the USB ethernet adapter from Amazon. There are two modules that needs to be downloaded, extracted and loaded onto ESXi. I have included the links below for your convenience:. As the mentioned, you can load using either the vmkloadmod or ESXCLI.

Here are the two commands that I used in the following order: vmkloadmod /vmfs/volumes/mini-local-datastore-1/usbnetvz026 vmkloadmod /vmfs/volumes/mini-local-datastore-1/ax88179vz026 When I tried to initially load either of the modules, I would always get the following error: vmkwarning.log:2016-02-28T21:54:54.531Z cpu6:374787)WARNING: Elf: 2041: Load of failed: missing required namespace As you can imagine, I was pretty bummed to see this since I was afraid that something like this would happen. I was not sure if the device I had purchased no longer worked or if was the drivers? I saw that these modules were initially compiled for ESXi 5.1 (at the time, that was the latest version) and the only difference was that I was using a much newer version of ESXi, specifically 6.0 Update 1. I decided to install the latest version of ESXi 5.1 Update 3 and tried the process again and to my surprise, the modules loaded without errors. I suspect that this was a hard dependency on the namespace version which was version 9.2.1.0 and the latest version is now 9.2.3.0. After successfully loading the two modules, I ran the following command: esxcfg-nics -l to verify that ESXi did in fact did claim the USB ethernet device and as you can see from the screenshot below, it did indeed!

Next up, I needed to verify basic connectivity and added the new uplink to my existing vSwitch. You must use the following ESXCLI command (esxcfg-vswitch command does not work apparently for non vmnicX devices) esxcli network vswitch standard uplink add -u vusb0 -v vSwitch0 Once added, I hopped over to the vSphere C# Client to see if the device is now showing up under the Network Adapters tab, which it is. Finally, the last test was to make the vsb0 (this is how ESXi names the device) device the active connection while moving my existing vmnic0 to stand-by. Networking connectivity continued to function and I was even able to transfer an ISO image over the USB ethernet adapter without any issues. So it looks like it is possible to get a USB based ethernet adapter to function with ESXi, at least with the specific model listed above (PCI ID 0b95:1790).

The challenge now is to see if there is a way to build an updated version of the drivers targeted at the latest ESXi 6.0 release. From what I have been able to follow on the forum, it looks like there was also some amount of non-trivial code changes that were required to get the driver to function. If true, without those changes, it can difficult to re-compile the driver.

I have reached out to the original author to see if he might be able to share the changes he made to the driver code. In the mean time, if folks are interested in giving the build process a try, Trickstarter did a great two part write up on how to setup your build environment and compile an example driver. Although the write up is targeted at ESXi 5.x, you can download the equilvenet packages for ESXi 6.0 which includes the ESXi Open Source Disclosure Package as well as the VMware Toolchain which is required and used to compile the source code. I have provided the direct download links below.

You can also find the latest version of the USB ethernet adapter ax88179 ASIX driver. I have also attempted to compile just the driver but have already ran into some issues. I have not had time to dig further, so not sure how far I will be able to get.

Any tips or tricks others may have for compiling against ESXi 6.0, feel free to share them and I will give them a shot when I get some time! Hi Jeff, That’s interesting to hear that you had to modify the BIOs? I was actually warned by another user who owns NUC and said NOT to update the firmware/bios as it might make the M.2 not detectable:X I left the system as-is and I was able to setup ESXi, VSAN and VC. The only thing I can think of WRT to BIOS is perhaps Intel-VT wasn’t enabled and prevented you to power on 64-bit VMs? That would be the only thing but would be surprised if that’s disabled by default I’ve not done any performance tests, it was merely testing its functionality.

If I can get it working for other versions of ESXi, I may run a few tests. Hey Andreas, Nice hack!

Esxi Mac Os

I just tried and I was able to successfully load the modules and it looks like the USB Ethernet Adapter was claimed. I’ve not done any further testing, so not sure how stable it might be. However, I’m not a fan of this option as its hard to tell what unknown consequence might crop up and more importantly the stability of the driver given it was compiled against an older release of ESXi.

I’m actually in the process of building this out and targeting just a single module where as the current solution is two different modules. I hope to have some news soon, so stay tuned. Thanks for the always creative solutions 🙂. Peter says. I’m having the same issue as piccolo I have the same StarTech aadapter as William Lam, have used the files from google drive and get the same issue :/etc/rc.local.d esxcfg-nics -l Name PCI Driver Link Speed Duplex MAC Address MTU Description vmnic0 0000:00:1f.6 e1000e Up 1000Mbps Full b8:ae:ed:7c:40:a3 1500 Intel Corporation Ethernet Connection I219-V vusb0 Pseudo ax88179178aDown 0Mbps Half 32:d8:16:c2:7f:a3 1500 Unknown Unknown I have even tried “esxcli network nic up -n vusb0” and it is not brought up.

Hi, First of all, I would like to say that your postings are very good and have helped me immensely in the past I have managed to compile the ax88179178a driver and got it running on ESXi 5.5 (I am not running 6.0 yet) without needing to create a hacked usbnet module. I would be more that happy to provide you with the compiled module as well as the modified source code for you to try.

Also, if you have already setup the 6.x toolchain, recompiling the drivers should be very straight forward. As far as I can tell, the only change required to the code would be to set the appropriate namespace version using the following macro: #define VMKLNXMYNAMESPACEVERSION “9.2.2.0” VMKNAMESPACEREQUIRED(“com.vmware.usb”, “9.2.2.0”); VMKNAMESPACEREQUIRED(“com.vmware.usbnet”, “9.2.2.0”); Foe ESXi 6, I believe the versions above should all be 9.2.3.0, but haven’t checked yet. All modifications I made to the source code are within if statements, so should be easy to spot.

As I said before, if you would like the source code and pre-compiled binary (for 5.5) let me know what would be the best way to get them across to you. Disclaimer: I am not a programmer and this is my first foray into C code. I have been using the module on my home lab for 5 days now without problems, but I cannot guarantee the stability of the driver. says. Jose, Thanks for sharing. I’m actually surprised to hear that you’ve been successful in compiling with only changing the macros.

I’ve been working internally with an Engineer who works on our USB code and we’ve had to make quite a few changes to get it to properly compile and also correctly loaded (at least for 6.x). Given this is not an “officially” supported project, there’s been other more pressing matters the Engineer needs to attend to, so hopefully we’ll have an update soon on that front once he gets some free time. I agree that not requiring hacked usbnet module is ideal.

I do have a build toolchain available, so would be interested in the steps you took. Feel free to shoot me an email info dot virtuallyghetto at gmail dot com and I can see if I can reproduce for 6.x.

Jose Gomes says. Here’s a quick update – Thanks to Jose Gomes, I actually found out the compiled driver that I had built was a working driver for both ESXi 5.5/6.0, however I thought it wasn’t functional as I was not able to get valid link when ethernet cable was plugged in. I was also seeing some strange DMA errors spamming the vmkernel logs. It was after talking to Jose, did I realize the only difference between my env and his was that I was testing the USB NIC on my Mac Mini. Once I tried it on the Intel NUC, it immediately showed link (where as before it only claimed the device). So that’s some great news and big thanks to Jose for reaching out.

Now, the not so great news is that I ran a basic iPerf test and I found that I was not able to get the full speed of the GigE interface, in fact getting about 50% of the NIC w/inconsistent speeds. I’m going to run some additional tests and see if Engineering can spot any tweaks we could make to improve the performance, especially as this is running under USB 3.0, so hopefully we can do better.

You can see the details here: As of right now, I’ve got VIBs for 5.5u3 and 6.0u2 which should work for earlier 5.5/6.0 builds and will automatically load the module upon installation. If folks are really interested, I can publish them but I was hoping to get better results before sharing the VIB as they may change. 😀. Steve Furniss says. Its possible that your BIOS may not have USB 3.0 enabled, this was definitely true for earlier versions of the Intel NUC where you had to explicitly enable 3.0 in the BIOS.

For newer versions of the BIOS, USB 3.0 is now enabled by default and you can’t even go back to 2.0. Another way to check is running “lsusb” command and see if your device is connected to 1.0, 2.0 or 3.0 USB HUB. This should also give you some insights but I would probably check to make sure your BIOS is showing 3.0 or that its plugged into a 3.0 port. Sam Kaufman says.

Quick Update – Although you can use init scripts to reload the module, its not ideal as it’ll have to be custom for each env depending on how you’ve setup your uplinks. Thanks to some folks internally, I’ve been able to update my VIB so that it’ll automatically load upon startup based on whatever configuration you’ve configured. No need to touch your init scripts for this and download URLs should not change and points to the latest version. Give it a shot and let me know if you have any questions Also, if you have a Mac that.has. USB 3.0, the USB NIC should also work. I’ve actually been doing most of my testing recently on my Macbook Air so I don’t have to keep power cycling my NUC 🙂. Steve Furniss says.

Esxi Nic Teaming

Hi all, Excited to see this. I think I’m having similar problems to someone before, at first I thought it was a usb3 issue, so I changed the setting in bios to xhci enabled. I can firm the adapter is now connected to a usb 3 hub.

Esxi To Use Specific Nic For Mac Free

Its still showing as down when I do esxcli network nic list. I try esxcli network nic up -n vusb0 and it results in some messages below in the vmkernel.log. Adding to a vswitch, and connecting to the network results in nothing.