NIC physical (eth?) to Virtual (VMNIC?) mapping

[jmangan]

Hi, I was asked to upgrade an ESX 3.01 machine from a dual-port NIC to a quad-port NIC since I have some Linux experience and am not completely lost on the command line.

The server has two integrated NICs dedicated to Service Console and Vmotion. The upgrade seems to have gone okay. The new ports are active and working. What worries me is that if I do 'ifconfig -a' they are labelled as vmnic4-7 rather than vmnic2-5. I have looked at /etc/modules.conf but the module for the old card is not loaded there. There are aliases for the new card from eth2-eth5. I have tried lsmod but I am not seeing as many modules as I would expect and none for NICS. I have also checked a number of other tools and files, e.g lspci, /etc/vmware/* but I can't find where this mapping is configured.

I have done multiple searches for this but I cannot find anything that is very helpful so my questions are:

1 - Should I be worried about this mismatch between the physical and virtual NIC labels?

2 - If I should can anyone tell me (or direct me to a resource that can) how to correct this?

TIA.

[jccoca]

Hi,

Don't worry, is because you still have the configuration of the old card in the esx.conf. You can correct this by changing the /etc/vmware/esx.conf

[jmangan]

Thanks for that. I did look at that file and I can find references to vmnic0,1,4,5,6 & 7 but not to vmnic 2,3.

If 2 & 3 are not listed in there it is not clear to me that that is why the new ports are labelled as 4,5,6 & 7?

Are you advocating just renaming the entries in esx.conf?

[jccoca]

I'll let it with the current labels, but if you want still to change it you can rename all entries in the esx.conf and reboot server.

[Texiwill]

Hello,

There is no direct mapping from vmnic # and actual NIC port. The fact that you now have 4,5,6,7 really does not mean anything as you has 2,3 before...

Every time I play around with the pNICS (physical NICs) on my systems I create a new drawing of the back of the box where I equate port location to PCI ID to vmnic name. The only way to create this mapping is to have some method to light up the port either by sending dedicated traffic or by removing the cable and replacing it once you notice which device is which inside ESX.

This physical mapping (visio drawing) allows me to keep straight everything without any guesswork. I now know which PCI ID maps to which physical device and the names within ESX. I would even add in the cable ID to this map. Then next time I upgrade need to add more NIC, I have a new map to make. This drawing is incredibly important when debugging networking problems.

Best regards,

Edward