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Injecting dellshar.v00 PERC Driver into ESXi 8.0 Installer ISO for Dell VRTX

This guide explains how to inject the dellshar.v00 driver—extracted from a working ESXi 7.0.3 system—into the ESXi 8.0 installer ISO. This enables installation on a Dell VRTX system where the default ESXi 8 installer does not recognize the PERC RAID controller.

Prerequisites

Section titled “Prerequisites”
  • A Linux system with 7z, tar, and mkisofs or genisoimage installed
  • Official ESXi 8.0 ISO
  • Access to a working ESXi 7.0.3 system with Dell’s Addon
  • SCP access to both systems (or alternative file transfer mechanism)

1. Extract the driver from an ESXi 7.0.3 host

Section titled “1. Extract the driver from an ESXi 7.0.3 host”

From the working ESXi 7.0.3 host:

Terminal window
scp root@esxi7-host:/bootbank/dellshar.v00 .

This copies the required PERC driver file from the working system.

2. Extract the contents of the ESXi 8 ISO

Section titled “2. Extract the contents of the ESXi 8 ISO”
Terminal window
mkdir -p ~/esxi8-vrtx/iso
cd ~/esxi8-vrtx
7z x /path/to/VMware-VMvisor-Installer-8.x.x-xxxxxx.x86_64.iso -oiso

The ISO contents will now be extracted into ~/esxi8-vrtx/iso.

3. Copy the driver into the ISO structure

Section titled “3. Copy the driver into the ISO structure”
Terminal window
cp dellshar.v00 iso/

This places the driver module in the root of the installer where it can be loaded at boot time.

4. Modify boot.cfg to load the driver

Section titled “4. Modify boot.cfg to load the driver”

Edit the boot configuration file:

Terminal window
nano iso/boot.cfg

Locate the modules= line. Insert --- dellshar.v00 between s.v00 and bnxtnet.v00:

Before:

modules=--- s.v00 --- bnxtnet.v00 --- ...

After:

modules=--- s.v00 --- dellshar.v00 --- bnxtnet.v00 --- ...

Save and close the file.

5. Rebuild the custom ESXi 8 ISO

Section titled “5. Rebuild the custom ESXi 8 ISO”
Terminal window
cd iso
mkisofs -relaxed-filenames -J -R -o ../ESXi-8.0-VRTX.iso \
-b isolinux.bin -c boot.cat -no-emul-boot -boot-load-size 4 -boot-info-table .

The rebuilt installer ISO will be saved as ~/esxi8-vrtx/ESXi-8.0-VRTX.iso.

6. Install ESXi 8 using the modified ISO

Section titled “6. Install ESXi 8 using the modified ISO”
  • Write the ISO to a USB drive or mount it using iDRAC
  • Boot the Dell VRTX host from the ISO
  • Proceed with the installation. The storage should now be detected correctly

7. Verify the driver is loaded (optional)

Section titled “7. Verify the driver is loaded (optional)”

After booting into ESXi, access the shell and run:

Terminal window
vmkload_mod -l | grep dell

You should see the module associated with dellshar.v00 loaded into the kernel.