Pinging the ESXi host IP fails after reboot

Products

• VMware vSphere ESXi

Issue/Introduction

The symptoms are:

• After a reboot of the ESXi host, the machine shows disconnected from VirtualCenter and does not respond to ping.
• From the host console, you can still ping out.
• The host has a management network port group and a VMotion port group.
• When doing an esxcfg-vmknic -l, the VMotion port group has an interface next to it named vmk0 but the management network port group has no interface.
• The VMotion IP can respond to ping from outside but the management network cannot.
• You cannot delete the management network from vmknics and you cannot remove the management network port group from the virtual switch.
• Adding a new management network port group with a different name and adding a new vmknic for it succeeds but cannot be managed through the management GUI.
• The vSwitch shows that the management network has an uplink NIC.

Environment

VMware ESXi 3.5.x Installable

Resolution

Use esxcfg-vswitch to remove the uplink from the management network port group, and add a NIC back to the management interface.

 

Note: If more than one vmk interface is present, remove all vmk interfaces.

To ensure you can ping the ESXi host:

1. Restart Management Network to re-establish connection:
   
   esxcfg-vmknics -d <port group name>
   esxcfg-vswitch -d vSwitch0
   esxcfg-vswitch -l
    
2. This causes the esxcfg-vmknic -l to display an interface for the port group which restores network connectivity for it both in and out.
3. The reason the host can still ping out but cannot respond to outside ping requests is because it is using the VMotion IP to ping out, but this IP does not respond to traffic destined for the management network IP.
4. Simply reconfiguring the IP information for the management network through the host GUI does not fix the problem.

For additional information, see Failure to remove VMkernel port group after upgrading from ESX 3.0.x to 3.5 (1007571)