Emulex OneConnect OCe10102 on ESXi 6.0

Please refer to following post for basic troubleshooting of Emulex OneConnect.

How to Install Proper Drivers for 3rd Party Network Adapter on ESXi 5.x

I have a box uses Emulex OneConnect OCe10102 network adapters. The adapter is quite old and Emulex brand card doesn’t support ESXi 6.0. I upgraded the server to ESXi 6.0 and the Emulex adapters lost.

In the initial troubleshooting, I noticed that the adapters are still visible in BIOS. So it should be some driver level issues. I checked VMware Compatibility Guide. The model OCe10102 doesn’t support by ESXi 6.0.

If you run the following command you will still be able to see the adapters in PCI list on ESXi.

[code language="perl"]
esxcli hardware pci list
[/code]

So it indicates the adapters are not visible in ESXi since the newer Emulex driver doesn’t contain the model of the adapter in ESXi 6.0 native driver.

Then I uninstalled the native Emulex driver for ESXi 6.0 by the following command and rebooted the ESXi host.

[code language="perl"]
esxcli software vib remove -n elxnet
[/code]

The adapters still not visible after rebooting since no any drivers for Emulex adapters. Then I downloaded the Emulex drivers for ESXi 5.5 on VMware website and uploaded the “offline” package in the zip file to /tmp directory of the host. Then installed the driver by the following command:

[code language="perl"]
esxcli software vib install -d "/tmp/xxxxx.zip"
[/code]

The adapters appeared after rebooting the host.