vSphere 6.5 iSCSI Binding Bug…Dude, Where’s My Unused Adapters?
How to set vmnic to unused using CLI
Table of contents
Problem
Tonight I was going through an install of ESXi 6.5 (No vCenter yet) and I wanted to setup iSCSI binding to provide multiple paths to the iSCSI array. This requires setting the other vmnic into an “Unused” State. I need to set vmnic5 to unused, however I quickly realized there was no Unused Adapter option in the GUI as shown in Figure-1, only Mark Active or Standby.
Figure-1
I then SSH into the host and ran the following command:esxcli network vswitch standard portgroup policy failover get -p iSCSI-1
Notice in Figure-2, there is an “Unused Adapter” so I thought maybe there is an ESXCLI command to set the vmnic adapter to “Unused” so I ran the following command:esxcli network vswitch standard portgroup policy failover set –help
As you can see in Figure-3 there is only “active-uplink” and “standby-uplink”.
Figure-2
Figure-3
Like most I googled it and came across a bug report on VMware’s Fling site found here were other users experienced the same issue.
Workaround
Continuing to troubleshooting the issue and stumbled across a workaround and figured why not share it. To workaround this issue we need to set the standby adapter (vmnic5) to Unused by issuing the following ESXCLI command:esxcli network vswitch standard portgroup policy failover set -p iSCSI-1 -a vmnic5
. The results are shown in Figure-4. This moves vmnic5 to active while also moving vmnic1 to Unused. In my case I need to have vmnic5 set to Unused so I run the command again but this time using vmnic1, as shown in Figure-5.
Figure-4
Figure-5
There you have it a quick workaround around for this issue! If you found this helpful please share it.