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Realtek Network Driver for ESXi

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I never thought this day would ever come as I am sure this will come as a complete shock to many, but I am pleased to announce that we have just released a new VMware Fling: Realtek Network Driver for ESXi 😎

Yes, you read that right! 🤯


In fact, I have it running on my Minisforum MS-A2 which has an RTL8125 (2.5GbE), which I can now use! The RTL Driver can be installed on either ESX 8.0 Update 3+ or 9.x+

This Realtek (RTL) PCIe-based driver is NOT an official driver from Realtek, it was developed by one of our VCF Engineers, Wenchao 👏

The driver currently supports the following RTL PCIe Devices:

  • RTL8111 - 1GbE
  • RTL8125 - 2.5GbE
  • RTL8126 - 5GbE
  • RTL8127 - 10GbE

To download the Realtek Network Driver for ESXi offline bundle, head over to the Free Downloads section for Flings on the Broadcom Support Portal (BSP).

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Auditing ESX DCUI Logins

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For troubleshooting purposes, users may need to access the ESXi Direct Console User Interface (DCUI), either remotely through an out-of-band system like an iDRAC or iLO, or directly from the physical server.


For auditing purposes, all login methods to ESXi (SSH, API, Host Client, and DCUI) are recorded, and a corresponding vSphere Event called UserLoginSessionEvent is generated for easy filtering.

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Scaling ESX DCUI & Console for Compressed Screen Resolution

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I recently shared my VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) 9.0 Mini Rack build, which includes the use of a tiny 7" LCD screen for direct console access to the ESX hosts. Since the LCD is optimizing for the 10" inch rack, it is also using a non-standard resolution of 1280x400, which can make the output pretty compressed as you can see from the ESX DCUI screen.


This is definitely a niche use case, but I was curious if we had any workarounds that could be used to improve the screen resolution, especially handling large amounts of text when going into the ESX Shell 🤔

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