ESXi 4.0.0 Build 164009 Error Renaming Port Groups

[HernanRuggiano]

Hello, I'm using this version on 2 blades and I found amuzing that this would happen. I changed the name of portgroups that were already assigned to VM's and this caused an outage. I went ahead and edit the VM settings and that is when saw the network adapter network label, was the old one, so I said: "ok, it hasn't refreshed", So When I clicked on it, it was blank. ESXi 4 is using the names instead of id's to map the network port group, which I think and you may all agree that it's just not right. Let's say you have to change a bunch of servers from one vlan to another and you want to change the name also, cause you dont want anyone getting confused, you have to manually go to each server and edit the network label. Bug ?

Steps to reproduce:

- Create a portgroup named "whatever".

- Assign it to some VM's.

- Change the port group name to "whatever2"

- Check that you just lost connectivity on those VM's

- Edit the VM and check that the name of the network label is "whatever" instead of "whatever2"

Thanks

Hernan Ruggiano

Systems Administrator

[AntonVZhbankov]

Not a bug, it's just the way it works.

Do not perform such actions on production system, always go to maintenance mode first.

---

VMware vExpert '2009

http://blog.vadmin.ru

[bulletprooffool]

Hernan,

PortGroup Names are valid idntifiers, which are unique to the host. we manually match them on different hosts, in order to allow VMOtion etc, but changuing the name on one host makes not changes to the other hosts.

in the same way, the names allocated to NICs are stored in the VMX files, which do not get edited as you change port group names.