Unable to detect vmnics after PCI card upgrade - Mellanox Technologies MT27700 Family

Products

• VMware vSphere ESXi

Issue/Introduction

• The uplinks could not be detected after the PCI card upgrade. Under Physical Adapters, you do not see the uplinks visible.
• When accessed the ESXi through CLI, the command 'esxcli network nic list | grep vmnic': does not list the uplinks.
• In Cli, when you run: lspci | grep vmnic, the command lists all the uplinks.
• The driver is of Mellanox Technologies MT27700 Family
• Under /var/log/sysboot.log, you will see the below entry: 
  
  

Environment

• ESXi 7.x
• ESXi 8.x

Cause

The PCI network link type is set to Infiniband Controller. To verify you can SSH to the ESXi and run : 

lspci | grep Mellanox

0000:37:00.0 Infiniband controller: Mellanox Technologies MT27700 Family [ConnectX-4] <<<< see the controller type
0000:37:00.1 Infiniband controller: Mellanox Technologies MT27700 Family [ConnectX-4] <<<<

Resolution

For the uplinks to be visible in ESXI, the PCI network link type should be set to Ethernet Controller. It would be best recommended to make the changes in the presence of the physical vendor.

Additional Information

Reference : How to change the ESXi ConnectX4-VPI port from IB to ETH