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:

Add drivers to esxi 6 iso