DeWalt MD3220I manual

Dell PowerVault MD32xxi Configuration Guide for VMware ESX4.1 Server Software

By default, all the vmnics are assigned to each VMkernel port. We need to remove all but one vmnic from each VMkernel port so that each VMkernel port has only one uplink.

Before running these commands the switch information looks like the following (obtained using esxcfg- vswitch –lagain):

Switch Name	Num Ports	Used Ports	Configured Ports	MTU Uplinks
vSwitch2	64	7	64	9000
PortGroup Name VLAN ID Used Ports			Uplinks
iSCSI3		0	1	vmnic1,vmnic2,vmnic3
iSCSI2		0	1	vmnic1,vmnic2,vmnic3
iSCSI1		0	1	vmnic1,vmnic2,vmnic3

You can see that there are three vmnics in each uplink for each VMkernel Port. This is what we need to change so that only a single vmnic is in each uplink and that we manually load balance them across all available VMkernel Ports.

To configure this process via CLI first note the vmnic number of a NIC you want to remove and type the following command:

esxcfg-vswitch –p iSCSI1 –N vmnic3 vSwitch2

What this will do is remove vmnic3 from VMkernel port iSCSI1 so that now vmnic1 and vmnic2 are left on iSCSI1. We then need to remove vmnic2 so that only vmnic1 is associated with the iSCSI1. To do this type the following command:

esxcfg-vswitch –p iSCSI1 –N vmnic2 vSwitch2

Now that we have just one vmnic associated with one VMkernel port we need to remove the excess NICs on the other ports.

esxcfg-vswitch –p iSCSI2 –N vmnic1 vSwitch2

esxcfg-vswitch –p iSCSI2 –N vmnic3 vSwitch2

esxcfg-vswitch –p iSCSI3 –N vmnic1 vSwitch2

esxcfg-vswitch –p iSCSI3 –N vmnic2 vSwitch2

To verify that this was done correctly type the following command:

esxcfg-vswitch –l

The output will look similar to this:

Page 19