ESXi 6.5 u1 vlan assignment issues when virt has more than 3 NICs

[Ghoster23]

I'm running a student version of ESXi 6.5 u1 that is essentially the enterprise plus version, but limited to only 1 vhost and no license for vCenter.

I'm having issues with a virtual appliance that has 4 virtual NIC's installed. The vHost is connected to my physical switch with a trunk port that allows all configured VLAN's to traverse the trunk. In the virtual appliance, two NIC's are connected to the same VLAN and the last 2 are connected to different VLAN's for a total of 3 VLANS. When I look a the vswitch view and each VLAN, I see 2 connections in each of the 3 VLAN's and they are the same MAC address of the first two NIC's in the appliance, the last two do not show up at all.  If I delete 2 NIC's, the two remaining show in each assigned VLAN as expected. If I add 1 NIC for a total of 3, I get the same behavior. This is not just showing incorrectly, the virtual appliance is also not working as expected in each VLAN.  Thought this might just be the appliance having issues so tried an Ubuntu server VM that I created that already had 2 NIC's. When I added the third NIC, it exhibited the same issues.

Troubleshooting:

I have rebooted the appliance and the vhost several times, deleted and re-added the NIC's in various stages to isolate when the issue shows up, tried to upgrade to ESXi 6.7, but my vhost is not compatible with 6.7, reinstalled 6.5 with no difference in behavior and attempted to downgrade. Since a downgrade requires a complete reinstall, I've decided to ask here for options. Any suggestions that require a vCenter server is not an option since my license does not include that. That also means that I am not able to use the software update services unless there's a way to install an update manually (or it doesn't require vCenter Server), but then I'd also have to be able to download the update package(s).

This appears to be a bug in 6.5, but am hoping it's not and there's a fix for it. Any suggestions?

Update:

I've marked the answer from A.P. as the correct answer, but it's really only partially correct. Since my VM wasn't working, and I wasn't seeing the correct output, I assumed I was seeing the same issue. In reality, there were two issues, this one and a configuration issue with the VM itself.

For those that may come by this later, the VM is running GNS3 and I wasn't able to pass traffic on each NIC when configured on separate vlans. I was assigning them correctly, but since I wasn't seeing the correct assignments when I viewed the vSwitch, I assumed that was the issue. Once I enabled promiscuous mode on each NIC on the GNS3 VM, it started working as expected.

[a_p_ · Accepted solution]

The issue with the same MAC addresses showing up is a display issue which has been fixed in the latest version of the ESXi Embedded Host Client (by removing the MAC addresses from being displayed at all).  I'd suggest that you upgrade the Embedded Host Client to see whether this solves the network issues. If it doesn't, please provide more information, e.g. some screenshots, used IP addresses for the different NICs, ...

André

[Rohitsa]

IF i understand correctly

you have one box with 4 NICs say A,B,C,D which you are trying to Map to 3 virtual nics in an appliance , say your nics are a,b,c,d you are trying to add NIC A and B are in same vlan say vlan x and NIC C in VLAN Y and D in VLAN Z, your problem is , after Assigning A and B Nics to Vlan X you are not being able to see NIC C and D to assign in VLAN Y and Z respectivily

Check if you have not configured Teaming at Physical NIC level

Check what king of Tagging you are using , EST,VST or VGT

Follow the procedure in the below kb to ensure you are using consistant TAgging , understand that you should have one type of tagging and you should stick to it

VMware Knowledge Base

[Ghoster23]

Rohitsa,

You're over complicating the issue. I have a vHost with 2 NIC's that are connected to the same vSwitch. The vSwitch is the basic one since I'm using the free version of ESXi. Both NIC's are configured as vlan trunk ports on my physical switch. I have several port groups set up on the vSwitch that I can assign to the virtual NIC within each virtual machine. Each port group is assigned to only one vlan.

The visual issue is that when I assigned the VM to more than one port group, the first two NIC's would show up in all assigned port groups when looking at the vSwitch view. Any additional NIC's would not show up at all, on any port group regardless of assignment. According to a.p. this is only a visual issue and the assignments are made correctly and just don't appear correctly.