Mike's Realm

I was recently updating my home lab and ran into an issue with my NICs as VMware no longer has the Realtek 8168 drivers embedded in the ESXi installer for 5.5/6.0.  I tried the old method of injecting the driver into the ISO and that proved unsuccessful since the driver is blacklisted — with the release of vSphere 6.0 VMware has implemented a driver blacklisting feature.  Fortunately you can bypass this feature to get your home lab up and running:

Unsupported VIB Installation Steps

1. Download driver offline bundle from VIBsDepot (at the very bottom of the page)
2. Upload the zip file to a datastore on your ESXi host using the vSphere Client
3. Enable SSH on the ESXi host (Refer to KB2004746 if needed) & login to the host using a SSH client
4. You now need to lower the VIB acceptance level to install this Community Supported VIB by executing the following command:
   
   esxcli software acceptance set --level=CommunitySupported

   1	esxcli software acceptance set --level=CommunitySupported

5. Now you can install your driver by executing the following command: (Replacing [DATASTORE-NAME] with the name of the datastore you uploaded the zip file to)
   
   esxcli software vib install -d  /vmfs/volumes/[DATASTORE-NAME]/net55-r8168-8.039.01-napi-offline_bundle.zip

   1	esxcli software vib install -d  /vmfs/volumes/[DATASTORE-NAME]/net55-r8168-8.039.01-napi-offline_bundle.zip

6. Finally, reboot your ESXi host to activate the driver and your done