Following on from my last post talking about How to update mpt2sas driver on ESXi 5? today we are going to look at updating network drivers for Broadcom and Intel NICs on VMware ESXi host. Procedure documented below will work with any version of ESXi 4.x and 5.x

Lets start by listing all network interfaces in “Up” state:

esxcfg-nics -l | grep Up

As you can see there are 10 network adapters in “Up” state which happens to be total as well on this host – 4 Broadcom 5709s and 6 Intel 82576s. Portion of the screenshot that we’re particularly interested in is just before the “Up” word i.e. bnx2 and igb – these are driver names that ESXi is using for our network cards. Now that we have this established lets look at the version of said drivers:
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