Inconsistent Alias Assignment in NVMe over TCP Storage setup

Products

• VMware vSphere ESXi

Issue/Introduction

- vmhbas to vmnic ordering is not sequential

- In some customer setups vmhba64 binds to vmnic8 and vmhba65 binds to vmnic4

- Some customers have requirements that the numbering be consistent so ideally

vmhba64 -----> vmnic4

vmhba65 -----> vmnic8

Environment

NVMe over TCP Storage setup on ESXi

Cause

In these circumstances, at the time of first enablement of NVMe/TCP, the first adapter gets created on the vmnic8 and then the second gets created on vmnic4.

This means that the first adapter will get the first vmhba, in this case vmhba64.

Resolution

If the customer wants to avoid this situation please follow:

a) Disable NVMe/TCP adapter on the vmnics
b) reboot the system gracefully (a graceful shutdown and boot has to happen)
c) Once the system is backup configure NVMe/TCP on vmnic4 first
d) The adapter alias will now be persistent.