Wondering if there's a trick to getting a Dell PowerEdge 2950 to recognize a routerboard 44 4-port ether card. I can see it in the BIOS, but it says <unknown Manuf.> and VMWare esxi 5 refuses to recognize it at all. Any trick, tips, or info would be greatly appriciated.

topic title is misleading. it looks like VMware is the one having problems, not the Dell.

Is the chipset used by the card on VMware's Hardware Compatibility List? If it's not, why do you expect it to work?

-- Nathan

Yes its on the compatibility list. I removed the rb44 and installed a 44g. The next thing i know its causing a hardware conflict and restaring the server every time you connect via network. This isn't vmware not detecting it. The server itself either doesnt detect, or completely mislabel it (it thinks its a realtek).

More curious if anyone knows any tricks to get this thing working. More or less, disable some embedded devices to open up irq's for the nic or something else to get it rolling.

I'm not sure. I would think that even if the Dell BIOS incorrectly detected the card, this would not necessarily prevent ESXi or any other OS from being able to use it...many OSes don't rely on/trust the information that the BIOS feeds them and probe all the hardware again themselves.

Perhaps the problem has more to do with the PCI bridge chip on the card? If memory serves me correctly, these cards essentially have 4 separate PCI ethernet MAC chips on them, and a PCI bridge that allows it to "multiplex" all 4 PCI devices on one PCI slot/card. Perhaps there is an incompatibility between that chip and the 2950 motherboard somehow? Just a guess...

-- Nathan