Disabled port shown as up in ESXi 6.0

[comr]

Hi, I disabled a port in my SAN switch but in esx the vmnic was still shown as up. Then via console I forcely bring down the vmnic then up and tried again to enable and disable the port in the switch and everything worked as normal. Is this normal behavior?

[rcporto]

Sorry, but unless I'm missing something, if you're talking about HBA the name of device on ESXi should be vmhba and not a vmnic that is supposed to be a ethernet port (LAN, not a SAN port).

[JagadeeshDev]

Hi

If you are referring to the Ethernet cards ( vmnic) then it should be in the network switch not the SAN switch. SAN ports are connected to HBA  ( vmhba0/vmhba1..)

[comr]

I'm talking about ISCSI cards that are connected in a SAN switch. Ethernet ports can easily be used in a SAN network that uses ISCSI protocol.

[rcporto]

Ok, and I know that we can use Ethernet port for storage traffic like iSCSI, anyway just asking, but are you sure you're disabling the correct port ? Do you have CDP or LLDP enabled on switches (virtual and physical) to identify the correct port where your host is connected ? This is a rack server or blade server ?

[comr]

Yes I'm am sure, look what I've done to test things:

port 24 enabled in switch

vmnic7 shown as up in vsphere client

port 24 disabled in switch

vmnic7 still shown as up in vsphere client (this is the problem!)

vmnic7 forcibly down with command "esxcli network nic down -n"

vminc7 shown as down in vsphere client (the command triggered it)

vmnic7 forcibly up with command "esxcli network nic up -n"

vminc7 shown as down in vsphere client (as expected because the port24 is still disabled)

port 24 enabled in switch

vmnic7 shown as up in vsphere client (now the status was reported as expected)

port 24 disabled in switch (to see if the problem reapears)

vmnic7 shown as down in vsphere client (problem solved?)

port 24 enabled in switch (to test again)

vmnic7 shown as up in vsphere client (yes, problem solved)

As you see after I forcibly restarted the vmnic with the command then it's status became to shown normally.