ifconfig and ethtool utility might fail to display information about all the VMNICs

Products

• VMware vSphere ESXi

Issue/Introduction

When a mezzanine card from a vendor other than the LOM is loaded into an ESX system, the ifconfig and the ethtool utilities might fails to get the interface information for the VMNIC that is loaded second.

When you use the command ethtool -i vmnicX in the ethtool utility, you see errors similar to:

Cannot get driver information: No such device

This issue does not occur when all network devices are supplied by the same vendor.

Environment

VMware ESXi 4.1.x Embedded
VMware ESX 4.1.x
VMware ESXi 4.0.x Installable
VMware vSphere ESXi 5.0
VMware ESXi 4.1.x Installable
VMware vSphere ESXi 5.5
VMware ESX 4.0.x
VMware ESXi 4.0.x Embedded
VMware vSphere ESXi 5.1

Resolution

This is a known issue with ifconfig and the ethtool.

You can run this alternate command for ESXi 5.x version:

esxcli network nic get -n interface_name

The functionality of the NIC is not affected. The NIC will report its status correctly and it can be assigned an IP address as normal.