ESXi 6.0 iscsi vNIC is vmnic0

[nikthatte]

I had a working service profile for an esxi 6.0 host. It is booting from a netapp iscsi LUN and once in VMware, it has two other adapters. I had to reinstall vmware earlier this week and I realized that none of the changes are being saved post the boot. It is also coming up with the iscsi vnic as vmnic0 in esxi. Anyone see anything like this before?

[Niko Nikas]

Hello,

I can't speak to the changes not being saved, although I would suspect that this means there is some disconnect between the host and storage (changes aren't being written and thus not persisting through reboot).

Regarding the iscsi vNIC as vmnic0, this could certainly be possible, and is based on how ESXi enumerates the devices.

See the below VMware KB.

https://kb.vmware.com/s/article/2091560

Hope this helps!

--

Niko

[Kirk J · Accepted solution]

Greetings.

You don't want your iSCSI vNIC  devices tied to your 1st "overlay" VNIC, that the esxi MGMT VMK0 will be bound to.

You want it bound to some other VNIC  other than the 1st one, and then confirm once you've installed ESXi, and booted for the first time that the software iSCSI initiator (that should have inherited the iscsi IP info from the iSCSI vNIC) is still bound to the correct VMNIC (shouldn't be VMNIC0).

This is a common issue (not saving settings) when the iSCSI boot VNIC is linked to the 1st VNIC, which is linked to by VMK0/MGMT IP.

Thanks,

Kirk...

[nikthatte]

Hi Kirk, you are right and I was not using vNIC 1 as the overlay vNIC but vmware was still identifying it as vmk0. I was able to speak to someone on the SAN team at Cisco so quickly suggested using a vNIC placement policy forcing VMware to recognize the iSCSI nic as the last vmnic.