I was working with a Dell M1000E Chassis this weekend, installing VMWare ESXi 6.5 Update 1 onto a number of Dell M620 server blades when I ran into an error adding the additional physical NICs to each virtual switch post install.
“There are no free physical adapters to attach to this virtual switch”.
In the end I had to refer to this VMWare knowledgebase article for the commands to add the physical NICs to the vswitch from the command line.
I used the following commands on each ESXi host after enabling SSH access;
esxcli network vswitch standard uplink add --uplink-name=vmnic1 --vswitch-name=vSwitch0 esxcli network vswitch standard uplink add --uplink-name=vmnic5 --vswitch-name=vSwitch1 esxcli network vswitch standard uplink add --uplink-name=vmnic3 --vswitch-name=vSwitch2 esxcli network vswitch standard list
I also ran into another problem trying to bind the VMK interfaces to the iSCSI initiator.
Thankfully Dave Davis had already solved that problem in a post titled, vSphere 6.5 iSCSI Binding Bug…Dude, Where’s My Unused Adapters?
I haven’t worked much with VMware ESXi 6.5 but I’m already missing the legacy vSphere client.
Cheers!
Update: Saturday September 9, 2017
I should point out that you can still use the VMware vSphere 6.0 Client to manage an VMware ESXi 6.5 server. You don’t need to use just the new web UI. Thank to Grant for pointing out that fact!
Update: February 28, 2019
This issue has been resolved in VMware ESXi 6.5 Update 2
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You can only use the vSphere client if you haven’t updated to ESXi 6.5 Update 1. After that it will insist on trying to download a file that doesn’t exist and no longer works.
Interesting, I just tested and found the same thing… interesting… did you happen to log a ticket with VMware?
Cheers!
How do I assign Ethernet ports (NIC) to each VM created? (VMware ESXi 6.5 Web UI)?
I am a novice when it comes to VMware and this is my first time creating Virtual Machines. Currently, I am stuck, trying to assign individual internet connections to each individual VM.
My setup is a host PC with four (4) VMs created and I installed a PCI-E network card with four (4) individual Ethernet ports. I am using both the VMware ESXi web user interface (accessed by my unique STATIC ID) and the VMware VSphere Client (which will not allow me to edit settings; for 5.5 and older) to create/edit/access the VMs.
I understand there are no longer any physical NICs and it is now virtual, but how do I create/assign VM an individual network?
Can someone please give me the dumbed-down (dummy version) of how to go about doing this? Maybe even provide screenshots? I have been troubleshooting for three (3) days now and everything I find is for older versions of the ESXi, unclear explanations, or I’m just missing something.
Any and all help is greatly appreciated!
Thanks in advance,
Hi S. Hill,
You create a Virtual Machine Port Group and then bind that to pNICs. Then when you create a VM with with a Ethernet connection you connect it to that specific Virtual Machine Port Group. I believe the default is called “VM Network”. ESXi will distribute the VM traffic across how many ever pNICs you have in the VMware host.
Good Luck!
with that problem you can also go to vswitch0 and edit it then delete the uplink until one is left for management network.after create new vswitch and add uplink it will allow.the main reason you get that message is because the management NIC took all of the uplink.
Not true… there was a free pNIC on the system that wasn’t in use. There is a known bug in that version that won’t allow you to add it to an existing vSwitch from the web GUI.
Cheers!
I was able to add uplink once I added my physical NICs into the “net.IOControlPnicOptOut”
Procedure
1.In the vSphere Web Client, navigate to the host.
2.On the Configure tab, expand the System group of settings.
3.Select Advanced System Settings and click Edit.
4.Type the physical adapters that you want to use outside the scope of Network I/O Control as a comma-separated list for the Net.IOControlPnicOptOut parameter.
For example: vmnic2,vmnic3
5.Click OK to apply the changes.
6.In the vSphere Web Client, add the physical adapter to the distributed switch.
Interesting workaround… I believe this issue has been fixed in later builds of ESXi.
Cheers!