In the event you do what I did and upgrade your ESXi hosts to a new version (in my case, I upgraded from 5.1 U3 to 5.5), you may need to manually update custom/third part drivers (referred to as VIBs). In fact, if you had to install the VIB manually, you’ll have to manually upgrade it.
I have nVidia GRID K2 cards in my hosts and didn’t think about the drivers until after I upgraded, as I thought they would just work. Unfortunately, they are ESXi version specific. Here’s the procedure to update to the appropriate drivers:
- Download the correct driver version (if you’re using nVidia cards, head to nVidia’s site and grab the correct drivers)
- Extract the zip and upload the vib to a datastore
- Connect via SSH and uninstall the 5.1 vib:
- Run this command to get the existing installed vibs:
esxcli software vib list
- Copy the name of the vib you want to remove. In my case it was:
NVIDIA-VMware_ESXi_5.1_Host_Driver
- Run this command to remove the vib:
esxcli software vib remove --vibname=NVIDIA-VMware_ESXi_5.1_Host_Driver
- You should see the result after a couple moments with a success. Run the list command again if you want to double check
- Run this command to get the existing installed vibs:
- Install the new vib:
- Browse to the datastore location where you uploaded the vib (
cd /vmfs/volumes/datastorex/nvidia/driver/NVIDIA-kepler-VMware_ESXi_5.5_Host_Driver_352.83-1OEM.550.0.0.1331820.vib
- From that location run this command to install the vib. You might not have to browse to the location first but it kept failing for me.
esxcli software vib install -v /vmfs/volumes/datastorename/nvidia_drivers/grid_esxi5.5/NVIDIA-kepler-VMwa
re_ESXi_5.5_Host_Driver_352.83-1OEM.550.0.0.1331820.vib - Wait for a success then star the xorg service:
/etc/init.d/xorg start
- This had to start 8 services (xorg0, xorg1…xorg7) for me. Not sure if that’s due to the Grid cards and if would be different on other cards
- You can also restart instead of just starting xorg – I do this just because it feels right 🙂
- Browse to the datastore location where you uploaded the vib (