We ran into an issue where installation of ESXi 5.1 hosts were failing as it was unable to detect the Network Adapters. The error message was, "No network adapters were detected, either no network adapters are physically connected to the system, or a suitable driver could not be located. A third party driver may be required...."
Servers were BL 490c G7 with HP Emulex 10GbE CNAs and Virtual Connect Firmware 3.6.
Suspecting the drivers issue, my first recommendation was to use the latest HP Customized image for ESXi 5.1 as it should include all the latest drivers needed. However the image being used was infact the Latest HP Image. And the drivers details page of the supplied image did show the be2net driver with version 4.2.327.0 included.
Looking further noticed the servers were running on pretty old firmware. Therefore, to rule out firmware issues, I started looking for the latest firmware for Emulex 10 Gbe CNAs and came across this excellent solution guide from hp:
http://vibsdepot.hp.com/hpq/recipes/September2012VMwareRecipe2.0.pdf
The above pdf also included the link to the latest firmware. Once the firmware was downloaded and updated, the installation proceeded successfully.
Lesson Learnt: Ensure the servers are running on latest firmware and are compatible with the current driver versions.
HP images for ESX/i can be downloaded from: http://h18004.www1.hp.com/products/servers/software/vmware/esxi-image.html
