The installer loads, you press Enter twice — and ESXi announces that no network adapters exist. On a whitebox PC this is the single most common dead end, and it has nothing to do with a faulty card. Your NIC works perfectly in Windows. ESXi simply does not carry a driver for it.
ESXi is not a general-purpose operating system with a giant driver library. VMware ships exactly the drivers it tests, for the hardware on its compatibility list, and nothing else. When the installer scans your PC and finds only a network chip it does not know, it cannot give the host an IP address — and a hypervisor with no network is useless, so the installer refuses to continue rather than installing something broken. Once you understand that, the error message stops being a mystery and becomes what it really is: a shopping decision you have not made yet.
👆 The chip decides everything, not the motherboard brand. Find the exact chip name before you troubleshoot anything else (illustration).
Rule out the basics first: the cable is seated and the switch port is alive, and the onboard LAN is enabled in the BIOS. Then find the exact chip model — Windows Device Manager under Network adapters, or the motherboard's specification page. If the chip is a Realtek, the diagnosis is already complete. No BIOS setting, no retry and no different USB stick will conjure up a driver that VMware never wrote.
Older ESXi versions could load community-built drivers through a compatibility layer called VMKLinux — that is how Realtek cards worked in the 6.x era, and why the internet is full of confident tutorials about injecting a Realtek VIB file. VMware removed VMKLinux in ESXi 7.0, and every driver since then must be a native driver signed by VMware. So each of those tutorials is either about an old 6.7 install or about hardware that already had a native driver. On a modern ESXi this is a wall, not a setting you have missed.
VMware Labs once published a USB Network Native Driver as a Fling — an official experiment that let people hang a USB Ethernet dongle off an ESXi host as a workaround. Flings are experiments, not products: this one was tied to the 6.7 and 7.0 era, needed manual care, and is not a route to plan a new install around today. If you find the fling while searching, read its dates before you read its steps. An experiment from several versions ago is history, not a solution.
Add a supported PCI Express network card and change nothing else. Intel I210 and I350 based cards are widely available — including good used server pulls — and they use native ESXi drivers straight out of the box. Fit the card, move the network cable from the motherboard port to the new card, and run the installer again: the No Network Adapters screen simply never appears. You can leave the onboard NIC enabled in the BIOS for other operating systems; ESXi will work with the card it knows.
A supported NIC costs less than the evening you will spend fighting this error. But some machines cannot take a card at all — a mini-PC or a laptop, for example. Then the honest options are a different host machine, or a hypervisor that supports consumer NICs: Proxmox VE and Hyper-V both drive Realtek hardware without drama. Picking the right tool for the hardware you already own is not defeat. It is the actual job of setting up a lab.
The video shows the network side of the build on the real machine — what the installer sees, and how the fix looks when it connects.
▶️ Watch Full VideoYes — if one of the chips has a native driver, the installer will find and list that adapter, and you select it as the management adapter in the DCUI after installation. The unsupported port is simply ignored by ESXi and keeps working for other operating systems.
Not as a supported route. No USB network driver ships in the box, and the old VMware Labs fling belonged to earlier versions. Treat USB dongle tricks you find online as museum pieces and plan around a PCIe Intel card instead.
There is no sign of it, and VMware's driver list follows enterprise hardware, not consumer motherboards. Plan your build as if a Realtek driver will never arrive — because for every version so far, it has not.