ESXi host not reachable after reboot or upgrade due to VDS(Virtual Distributed Switch) uplinks are lost

Products

• VMware vSphere ESXi

Issue/Introduction

• After an ESXi host reboot or upgrade, the host is not reachable on the network.
• The uplinks of the VDS are missing, the physical network adapter vmnic is not assigned to an uplink, and the network connectivity is lost on the VDS, as observed in the output of the esxcfg-vswitch -l command.

• In the jumpstart-esxcli-stdout.log file, the following error is observed:

<YYYY-MM-DD>T<HH:MM:SS> execution of 'boot networking restore --vswitches' failed : Failed to restore virtual switches: Unable to complete Sysinfo operation.  Please see the VMkernel log file for more details.: Not found

Environment

VMware vSphere ESXi 7.0
VMware vSphere ESXi 8.0

Resolution

• Identify the mismatch between net-dvs and configstore (Refer to Knowledge Base article 367673 for details).

    # net-dvs -l | grep -E '^switch|common.alias'

    # configstorecli config current get -c esx -g network_vds -k switches | grep -E 'name|uuid'

• Remove the stale entry in configstore, and then restart the ESXi host. 

    # configstorecli config current delete -c esx -g network_vds -k switches -i "## ## ## ## ## ## ## ##-## ## ## ## ## ## ## ##"