Using a D-Link DGE-530T Gigabit Network adapter in ESX 4.

For our developers ESX testbed/playground I wanted to install two D-Link DGE-530T Gigabit PCI Desktop network adapters unfortunately they do not appear to be on the ESX supported list. These are the steps I took to get them to be recognised by ESX:

1. Acquire the skge.o driver which supports the Marvell Yukon 88E0001 chipset

The discussion Using a Marvell LAN card with ESXi 4 contains a link to a tarball sky2-and-skge-for-esxi4-0.02.tar.gz containing both the sky2 and skge driver

2. login to ESX 4.0 as root and copy the skge.o driver to /usr/lib/vmware/vmknod

2.1 download sky2-and-skge-for-esxi4-0.02.tar.gz

2.2 tar xvzf ../sky2-and-skge-for-esxi4-0.02.tar.gz

2.3 cp vmtest/usr/lib/vmware/vmkmod/skge.o /usr/lib/vmware/vmkmod

3. run 'lspci' and identify the NICs location (the xx:xx.x number in front of the description)

03:00.0 Ethernet controller: D-Link System Inc Unknown device 4b01 (rev 11)

4. run 'lspci -n' and determine the vendor and device IDs (for D-Link it should be 1186:xxxx)

lspci -n
00:00.0 0600: 8086:29b0 (rev 02)
(snipped)
03:00.0 0200: 1186:4b01 (rev 11)
03:02.0 0200: 8086:1026 (rev 04)

5. create the vmware pciid file '/etc/vmware/pciid/skge.xml' here's a listing of the mine

cat /etc/vmware/pciid/skge.xml

<?xml version='1.0' encoding='iso-8859-1'?>
<pcitable>
  <vendor id="1186">
    <short>D-Link System Inc</short>
    <name>D-Link System Inc</name>
    <device id="4b01">
      <vmware label="nic">
        <driver>skge</driver>
      </vmware>
      <name>DGE-530T Ethernet NIC</name>
      <table file="pcitable" module="ignore" />
      <table file="pcitable.Linux" module="skge">
        <desc>D-Link System|DGE-530T Ethernet NIC</desc>
      </table>
    </device>
  </vendor>
</pcitable>

6. create file /etc/vmware/init/manifests/vmware-skge.mf which contains a single line as shown
cat /etc/vmware/init/manifests/vmware-skge.mf

copy /usr/lib/vmware/vmkmod/skge.o

7. reboot the server and checking the /var/log/vmware/esxcfg-boot.log should confirm:

That the esxcfg boot process has loaded the skge.xml metafile , constructed the new vmware-devices.map file and included the skge.o driver in the initramfs image.

8. running 'lspci' after adding a second DGE-530T card now shows

03:00.0 Ethernet controller: D-Link System Inc DGE-530T Ethernet NIC (rev 11)
03:02.0 Ethernet controller: D-Link System Inc DGE-530T Ethernet NIC (rev 11)

Of course the normal caveats and disclaimers apply as in not supported by VMware etc.