topic Re: NO PCIe/PCI slots available when attempting to add a NIC to a Workstation BIOS vm in VMware Workstation Pro Discussions

NO PCIe/PCI slots available when attempting to add a NIC to a Workstation BIOS vm

jchando — Sat, 16 Jan 2021 21:43:39 GMT

I recently virtualized a Windows 10 20H2 disk that had been set up as a GPT disk with an UEFI partition. After virtualizatzing the disk, i followed an EXCELLENT article that was able to change the GPT disk to a BIOS booting disk WITH NO DATA LOSS here: https://infra.engineer/windows/68-windows-server-convert-uefi-to-bios-without-data-loss-for-free

The only problem I am having now is that I cannot add a NIC to the machine when the machine is on; it results in a error that says

Cannot assign a PCI slot to 'ethernet0'. There are no more hot-pluggable PCI slots available in the virtual machine. Remove some devices from the virtual machine configuration and try again.

The above error is then followed by a second error that says

Device 'ethernet0' could not be hot-added. No free hot-pluggable PCI(e) slot is available.

I know that there is a misconfiguration in the VMX file and I have made different attempts to fix it without success. I have zipped both the VMX file and the error log. Can anyone take a look or help resolve the error? Many thanks in advance.

Re: NO PCIe/PCI slots available when attempting to add a NIC to a Workstation BIOS vm

ender_ — Mon, 18 Jan 2021 15:21:47 GMT

Is this about VMWare Workstation or ESXi? I don't think Workstation lets you hot-add network cards.

(also, why did you convert from GPT to MBR? Both Workstation and ESXi support UEFI boot)

Re: NO PCIe/PCI slots available when attempting to add a NIC to a Workstation BIOS vm

jchando — Mon, 18 Jan 2021 17:16:39 GMT

Workstation 15 permits the hot-adding of a NIC. What fixed the issue was the following link that provided entries in the VMX file:

https://community.netapp.com/t5/Simulator-Discussions/issues-about-Simulator-Clustered-ONTAP-8-2-1RC1-on-ESXi-5-1/td-p/23174

pciBridge0.present = "TRUE"
pciBridge4.present = "TRUE"
pciBridge4.virtualDev = "pcieRootPort"
pciBridge4.functions = "8"
pciBridge5.present = "TRUE"
pciBridge5.virtualDev = "pcieRootPort"
pciBridge5.functions = "8"
pciBridge6.present = "TRUE"
pciBridge6.virtualDev = "pcieRootPort"
pciBridge6.functions = "8"
pciBridge7.present = "TRUE"
pciBridge7.virtualDev = "pcieRootPort"
pciBridge7.functions = "8"

I had to convert from EFI to MBR because at work we will be converting an ESXi cluster running on hyperconverged Nutanix hardware to running natively on the Nutanix hypervisor. For the conversion to be successful with every VM (and we have a few hundred,) any VM machine that boots from a UEFI partition must be changed to boot through a MBR. We only have about 15 VMs that are affected but we needed to come up with a way to convert them without losing any data.

Re: NO PCIe/PCI slots available when attempting to add a NIC to a Workstation BIOS vm

continuum — Mon, 18 Jan 2021 20:52:07 GMT

we need the complete vmx-file to help you.
At the very least we need all the lines which specify PCIports

plus the virtualDev lines for ethernet* and scsi*

Ulli

Re: NO PCIe/PCI slots available when attempting to add a NIC to a Workstation BIOS vm

jchando — Tue, 19 Jan 2021 11:15:05 GMT

Thanks very much for your reply but this has already been resolved.

Re: NO PCIe/PCI slots available when attempting to add a NIC to a Workstation BIOS vm

imliv — Tue, 21 Mar 2023 14:56:23 GMT

Here is the vmx file. I have changed the extension to .csv so you can open in Note.