I needed recently to prepare an HO Proliant DL360 G6 for one of my customers. The server had the usual on-board network card by broadcom, and it was added a quad-port HP NC365T, based on Intel chipset 82580 MAC.

Unfortunately, even the last ESXi 4.1 U1 was able to detect the network card using the drivers of the installation CD.

So, I needed to install additional drivers, and I used this proedure:

– download additional drivers from this link

– unzip and mount the iso image

– place ESXi host in maintenance mode ed evacuate VMs on it

– through the CLI go in the directory of the ISO named offline-bundle and issue the command:

vihostupdate.pl –server hostname -i -b <offline-bundle>.zip

where we will change <offline-bundle>.zip with the name of the real zip file. The perl command will ask for username and password and will install the patch/update.

Finally we will have to reboot, and the network card will appear correctly in the hardware of the ESXi server.