I thought I had blogged about vmnics changing ID/name earlier on in the same manner as on this blog from SysAdminHell, but must have been mistaken. One of my first (bad) experiences with ESX was having to go in and undertake the same procedures as in that blog.
That blog entry only suggests that moving the physical NIC card causes the problem. My experience is that any change on the PCI bus can cause the vmnics to be renamed.
Perhaps that is only a problem with IBMs. Or perhaps not!
3 comments:
We had swapped one 2 port NIC for a 4 port NIC and ESX renumbered all the vmnics in the system. Since we did not know how to renumber them and our vendor who assisted us in implemented ESX didn't know how either, we re-installed ESX to get the numbering back in order. Glad I know better now.
I find it slightly disconcerting that the ESX is so sensitive to hw changes.
It was something no one seems to mention. OK, we do not often change the hw on the VMware servers, but hw failures aren't unknown now, are they?
I'm pretty sure the nic numbering has a lot to do with linux and less to do with ESX or IBM itself.
"The default name for Ethernet interfaces is based upon how Linux initializes them during device discovery. As Linux finds the network devices it will start numbering them starting with 0 and increasing sequentially. Device discovery is dependent on the device driver load order, PCI bus topology and the device driver code."
That's from a Dell pdf: http://linux.dell.com/files/whitepapers/nic-enum-whitepaper-v3.pdf
So you're right, PCI bus changes do affect the enumeration, not just hardware changes. Dell goes on in their pdf about how they can work around that, but I didn't read that far into it.
Also, see Texiwill's reply (a few replies down): http://communities.vmware.com/thread/90894
- Seth from SysAdminHell
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