4 x Physical NIC's, only two show in VMWare - HP C-Class Blades

[Marius402]

New Installation: I have an HP C-Class blade system with 4 x identically configured blades, each blade configured with 2 x Quad Core CPU's, 12GB RAM & 4 x NICS. The NICS are as follows, 2 x onboard Gigabit NICs and one NC326m (Dual Port Gigabit) in Mezzanine slot two. Four BNT Layer 2/3 switches installed, two connected to the onboard NICs and two connected to the Mezzanine NICs. VMware reports 3 of the blades having 4 x NICs available but one blade only reports 2. From the Onboard administrator I can see that all blades report identical network network configuration and all ports are active and connected to the GB switches. From a hardware point of view it seems that the NICs are loaded correctly. VMware on three of the blades report all NICs but one reports only two. Any suggestions on where and how to start tracing faults on this

All hardware used is on the HCL list.

Thanx

Marius

[LarsLiljeroth]

Hi

So just to make sure. What output do you get on the console with a esxcfg-nics -l . Can you see all nics here ?

[Marius402]

# esxcfg-nics -l

Name PCI Driver Link Speed Duplex Description

vmnic0 03:00.00 bnx2 Up 1000Mbps Full Broadcom Corporation Broadcom NetXtreme II BCM5708 1000Base-SX

vmnic1 07:00.00 bnx2 Up 1000Mbps Full Broadcom Corporation Broadcom NetXtreme II BCM5708 1000Base-SX

#

These are the two embedded NICs, the other two are still missing...

[Marius402]

And for reference, here's the output from one of the other blades that sees all four NIC's:

# esxcfg-nics -l
Name PCI Driver Link Speed Duplex Description
vmnic0 03:00.00 bnx2 Up 1000Mbps Full Broadcom Corporation Broadcom NetXtreme II BCM5708 1000Base-SX
vmnic1 07:00.00 bnx2 Up 1000Mbps Full Broadcom Corporation Broadcom NetXtreme II BCM5708 1000Base-SX
vmnic2 11:04.00 tg3 Up 1000Mbps Full Broadcom Corporation Broadcom BCM5715S Gigabit Ethernet
* vmnic3 11:04.01 tg3 Up 1000Mbps Full Broadcom Corporation Broadcom BCM5715S Gigabit Ethernet*
#

[chouse]

Just wondering if reinstalling ESX will make it see all 4 nics?

[Marius402]

That was the first action that I did, wiped the OS, reset the blade, re-install VMWare. Same result.

[chouse]

Probably a bad card; Install windows and see if it sees all 4 NICs. If not, must be a bad mezz card

[Marius402]

Found the problem, the mezz card was not seated properly. Took it out and re-installed it, worked fine after that. No idea why all the management software (including the EtherSwitch) reported the mezz to be good but the OS ignored it.

Regards

Marius