At some stage while in contact with VMware support, they may give you drivers to try. These drivers will be in VIB (vSphere Installation Bundle) format and will look something like vmware-esx-drivers-net-bnx2x-400.1.52.12.v40.4-1.0.4.00000.x86_64.vib. I don’t know why this is not documented anywhere in the official docs, but here’s how to install these driver bundles into ESXi.
- scp the file to the ESXi server
- Run “esxupdate -b <filename>.vib –nosigcheck –nodeps update”.
- Run “esxupdate query –vib-view” to confirm that the driver bundle is installed. You may need to reboot for the driver to take effect.
If you are fiddling with different driver revisions, you may need to remove a later version if you want to rollback to a previous version, otherwise ESXi won’t let you reinstall an older bundle. To remove a driver bundle use the following command:
esxupdate -b <driver bundle name> remove
You can get the driver bundle name by running “esxupdate query –vib-view”.