Have I bamboozled myself? Realtek 8111EP with ESXi 7.0

[VirtualBacon]

I found a great deal on an ASUS PN50 Mini PC with a Ryzen 7 4800U. The passmark score of that is the same as a single E5-2680 V4 which I have 2 in my main ESXi box. My goal here is to throw 64GB of RAM in it, a 2TB NVMe SSD and move a bunch of workloads over to it and eventually decommission the Xeon box

But I've made a mistake I think. The last time I messed with unsupported drivers was back with ESXi 6.5 and 6.7, and since then I've only had completely supported NIC's

Will I have any problems getting the Realtek 8111EP working in ESXi? Google searched yield few results! I'm getting worried

 

[BoredSysadmin]

I have good and bad news for you:
Good news first: Yes, you can install ESXi 6.7u3 (and vCenter 7.x if desired), which was released late last year on your Asus PN50 box
Bad news: Unfortunately, you're SOL regarding installing newer ESXi since VMWare dropped support for a major component (VMKlinux) which required support for these NICs drivers

Sources:

Adding Realtek 8111 driver to vSphere 6.7 image

virtualization, PowerCLI, vSphere, ESXi, NetApp, vCloud Director, linux, storage, bash

www.sysadminstories.com

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Realtek NIC and ESXi 7.0 - Use Passthrough to make use of the Adapter | virten.net

The last one allows you to pass-thru the Realtek NIC on ESXI 7 or newer host to a VM that might support the Realtek driver.

 

[VirtualBacon]

A real shame! I've ordered an M.2 to Intel I225 adapter, hopefully I can squeeze it in!

If I can get it going, I think this would be a great little ESXi box