vSphere Hypervisor supports on-board network adapters and those added with PCI/PCIe expansion slots only. There is no support for network adapters connected with USB which might be problematic in some test/dev/home lab use cases.
Recently a Fling was released that adds drivers to the ESXi for three most popular network adapters on usb:
- ASIX USB 2.0 gigabit network ASIX88178a,
- ASIX USB 3.0 gigabit network ASIX88179
- Realtek USB 3.0 gigabit network RTL8153
Looks like our office lab is going to get an upgrade soon š
You can download the drivers from here:
https://labs.vmware.com/flings/usb-network-native-driver-for-esxi
Please remember that Flings come under Technical Preview License with limited support and not recommended for production environments.
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