can't create portset: Out of resources

[JacobDEvans]

Having some issues creating a lot of vswitches, these are done programmatically, however I'm running into these errors:

WARNING: NetPortset: 1853: vswitch_id_254: no empty slots

WARNING: Net: 2155: can't create portset: Out of resources

ESXi Version	Maximum vSwitches
VMware ESXi, 6.5.0, 14320405	254
VMware ESXi, 6.7.0, 13006603	254
VMware ESXi, 7.0.0, 16324942	62
VMware ESXi, 7.0.1, 16850804	62

Neither of these are even close to the configuration maximums of 4096 and why is it so different between versions?

How can I create more than 256 vswitches on an esxi host!? Is this a bug with ESXi 7?

Reproducible:

powercli
for ($i=1; $i -lt 256; $i++) {New-VirtualSwitch -VMHost 192.168.0.10 -Name testswitch_$i }​
Get-VirtualSwitch -VMHost 192.168.0.10 | Measure-Object | Select-Object Count  | Format-List Count : 62

[daphnissov]

Ok, I'm going to ask the obvious question: Why do you want to create more than 256 vswitches on a single host?

[JacobDEvans]

programmatically we generate a switch per training and depending on the topic multiple vlans are created on that switch and then later the entire switch is destoryed.

[daphnissov]

What you're doing is so non-standard that more than likely you'll need to open a support case with GSS and have them investigate.

[JacobDEvans]

Support has confirmed this is an issue with the ESXi 7 software code, waiting on a response/patch.

[JacobDEvans · Accepted solution]

VMware has change the default allowable portsets, you can change them back to 6.7's values using these commands, they've assured me this will be fixed in 7.1

# Get the value
esxcfg-advcfg -j netNumPortsets

# Set the value
esxcfg-advcfg -k 256 netNumPortsets

# reboot

[hyperqube]

We are having the exact same problem on 7.0.1

When we try to run the command "esxcfg-advcfg -j netNumPortsets netNumPortsets = 256" we are getting the error "missing option name".  Any ideas here?

[JacobDEvans]

you could also try 

esxcli system settings kernel set -s "netNumPortsets" -v 254