I've been trying for a couple weeks to get an openwrt WAP working in esxi. I have been able to install openwrt and pass a usb wireless adapter through to the vm successfully. After that I run the following commands...

opkg update 
opkg install kmod-rt2800-lib kmod-rt2800-usb kmod-rt2x00-lib kmod-rt2x00-usb 
mv /etc/config/wireless /tmp 
wifi detect > /etc/config/wireless

I then restart the VM and when I go to the network tab in the Luci interface there is a Wifi option, but I have the dreaded "0% Wireless is disabled or not associated" message. At this point I have been looking all over the past couple weeks and tried everything I could find including...
-changing the channel to auto, and various numbers
-changing the hwmode to n, g, ng, etc.
-adding the disabled '0' line
-changing the htmode to HT20, HT40, etc.

...and various others. No matter what I do I can't seem to get the wifi interface to enable. Is there something blatantly obvious I'm missing?

You will see "0% signal" unless and until someone actually connects to the AP.  Does it appear to be on the air when you open the wifi menu on a phone etc?

For 2 GHz n hardware use hwmode g and HT20 or HT40 (if you have no neighbors).  "hwmode n" and "ng" do not exist.

Check dmesg for any wifi-related errors.

I see the SSID from my laptop, but when I try to connect it just spins for a while and then goes back to another SSID.

I checked dmesg and the only error I could see involved IPv6, but I'm not using it.

Another thing I notice is that under the Device configuration in Luci, the combo boxes for mode, band, channel, and width have no selectable options.

The appearance of the SSID on the air means that the wifi driver and hostapd are generally working.  Run logread -f to watch the system log while you attempt to connect.  Since hostapd is a user-space process, it does not log to the dmesg kernel log.

(Last edited by mk24 on 13 Jun 2017, 13:24)

I ran logread and tried to connect. I got three lines before my client was not able to connect...

...daemon.notice hostapd: wlan0...did not acknowledge authentication response
...daemon.notice hostapd: wlan0...did not acknowledge authentication response
...daemon.info hostapd: wlan0...authenticated...

But my laptop was not able to connect.

While I did do research about the adapter, maybe I didn't dig deep enough. Is there a specific nano USB adapter that someone has tested with openwrt on ESXi and everything works?