Hi community,
i am quite new to ESXi and purchased a server for private lab work and testing. The server (HP Proliant DL 380 G7) came with two extra Gbit ethernet cards, both providing two interfaces.
Now i have only one card available (two ports) and the other card is not usable. I ran through many articles and tips, checked compatibility and so forth. Nothing helped so far.
From my troubleshooting so far, i can tell, that:
The not usable NICs are vmnic0 and vmnic1. The other two, vmnic2 and vmnic3 are working as you will see during the various command outputs
- Card is recognized as PCI device (lspci -v | grep -A1 -i ethernet)
- The card not working is displayed as "Ethernet controller Network controller: Broadcom Corporation Broadcom NetXtreme II BCM5709 1000Base-T"
- The card working is displayed as "Ethernet controller Network controller: Broadcom Corporation NC382i Integrated Multi Port PCI Express Gigabit Server Adapter"
- Compatibility list on vmware.com lists my VID and DID as compatible and states a "bnx2" driver to be used
- The equivalent driver seems to be loaded (vmkload_mod -l | grep -i bnx shows bnx2i)
- Vendor ID is 14e4 and Device ID is 1639 (from various lspci outputs)
So finally, the only place in my server, where my cards are recognized is through "esxcli hardware pci list | grep vmnic0 -B7 -A29" (same for vmnic1).
And, obviously, the card is physically there
What do i do wrong? How can i determine, what kind of driver is used for the vmnic0 and vmnic1 interfaces card? I am not sure (as the chipsets are reported differently), if both require the loaded driver "bnx2i".
I have attached a doc (Word) with all the troubleshooting commands i executed, but i am done. No ideas left.
Can anybody help?
Many thanks,
Markus