Is it possible to remove a vmkernel port without putting the host into maintenance mode or rebooting if that vmkernel was bound to iscsi?
Stop me if you've heard this one before. We're running vSphere 5.5 and we have 3 pnics set up for iscsi. We have multipathing set up with a vmkernel port for each nic, one nic active and the other 2 unused. They are properly bound to iscsi and we have a dedicated vswitch for the iscsi connections. Since we only need two pnics for iscsi on each host, I've removed one pnic from the vswitch and removed its vmkernel (the one on which that pnic was active) and rescanned the storage adapters. The iscsi binding and activity for the 2 remaining vmkernels looks good. At this point, we've freed up that pnic and that's the main goal. However, I'd like to get rid of the associated vmkernel, but when I tried that all of the iscsi connections went dead and the 2 remaining vmkernels lose their active status in the iscsi binding. So I recreated the vmkernel with no active nic and set the 2 pnics to unused, and everything seems to be happy now.
Am I missing a step?
Edit - More info:
I removed the vmkernel from that host, cleared the VMs, put into maint mode and restarted. After it came back up, the iscsi binding bounced around for a few minutes with the 2 vmnics trading Active and Last Active status. Then they both became active and looked stable. Everything looks good after an hour and I took it out of maint mode.
I just migrated some VMs back to that host, and my Windows guests gave me the "No guest OS heartbeats are being received" warning. I migrated them anyway and they appear to be working fine. VMware Tools are running properly in the VMs. Also, if I migrate them to a host where I haven't made any changes, I don't get the warning.
Any ideas?
VMWare Environment: vSphere 7.0, EQ PS6210 SANs, Dell R730 Hosts, dedicated Dell switches w/ separate vlans for vmotion and iscsi.
