Adding a VMNIC to VDS getting failed with Error - A specified parameter was not correct

Products

• VMware vSphere ESXi

Issue/Introduction

This article provides information about vUSB0/PGUSB0 .

vUSB0  - The 'vusb0' interface is the Ethernet-over-Universal Serial Bus (USB) device to communicate between the systems Integrated Management Module (IMM) or Integrated Management Module II (IMM2) and the VMware operating system. It is not a physical Ethernet device and by design is not allowed to be a physical Network Interface Controller (pNIC).

 During the ESXi installation process, the hardware BIOS automatically creates a BM_C vSwitch and VMkernel (vmk), which remain active until the installation is completed successfully.

The hardware BIOS (Firmware) has pushed the standard switch and PGUSB0/vUSB0 (which is not a real NIC) under the name PGUSB0/vUSB0.

Note - It's important to note that this should not be treated as a PNIC. 

Environment

 

ESXi 7.0, U1, U2, U3c, U3d, U3e, U3f, U3g

Cause

On a new installation of ESXi, we might observe the new Network Virtual Switch and VMK1 network, which are associated with an APIPA dynamic IP address assigned to PGVUSB0/vUSB0.If users utilize this for VM or VMK purposes, they may encounter disconnection issues. 

ESXi does not consider this as a  physical Network Interface Controller (pNIC).

For example, If the vUSB0 adapter is in standby mode or is unused adapter, it will still appear as an available adapter when adding a any NIC to a Virtual Distributed Switch (VDS). If we try to add any NIC to VDS it will fail with an error below.

I

Resolution

ESXi will not allow the process of adding a VMNIC to vSwitch - vDs to complete unless the vUSB0 adapter is activated on other switches within the ESXi environment. To resolve this , we need to ensure that the vUSB0 adapter is set to active in other switch or disable.

Disabling this requires engagement with the hardware vendor, as we do not have control to disable the BIOS popup pushed vSwitch and vUSB0.

Note - We can remove the BIOS popup vSwitch and vUSB0, from the ESXi UI. However, they will reappear after the ESXi server is rebooted.