When installing ESX 4 you are asked about loading the system drivers. What do these actually do? Is there any consequences in installing or not installing them?
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This allows you to provide drivers for your hardware. Because ESX has a pretty tight hardware requirements list, it will generally already have the drivers for your hardware, however some hardware may need a new or updated driver to work properly and this option allows you to install this from the vendors disk. This is most frequently required for network cards.
If your setup works fine without supplying drivers then that's great. If it does not detect your NIC or other devices, you may want to try specifying some drivers from disk.