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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