Nutanix – Realtek NIC not recognized

Realtek is indeed one of the most commonly used manufacturers of onboard network interface cards (NICs), especially in consumer-grade motherboards and laptops.

If you have installed Nutanix Community Edition, it can happen that your network card is not recognized. Solution is specified in their own documentation, which can be found here.

In order to solve this issue, do the following:

1. As you can likely not SSH to the AHV, go directly on the AHV as root. Otherwise – SSH as root to your AHV.
2. Run the following commands to rebuild the initramfs, to include the realtek module, then remove the firstboot_fail flag and replace it with a new flag.

dracut -f --add-drivers realtek /boot/initramfs-$(uname -r).img
rm /root/.firstboot_fail
touch /root/.firstboot
reboot

The machine should now start up with proper Realtek drivers.