"Receive Packets Dropped" detected by vROps for Multiple VMs after migration from ESXi 7.0 to 8.0

Products

• VMware vSphere ESX 8.x

Issue/Introduction

After migrating Virtual Machines from ESXi 7.0 hosts to hosts running version 8.0, vRealize Operations Manager (vROps) begins to report "Receive Packets Dropped" on the network adapters of these VMs. This behavior was not observed when the VMs were running on the ESXi 7.0 hosts.

Environment

VMware vSphere ESX 7.x
VMware vSphere ESX 8.x

Cause

The packet drop counters observed after migration to ESXi 8.0 are a more accurate reflection of network activity.

• In ESXi 8.0, the vSphere network stack implements some functionality as part of an "IOChain" attached to a virtual port. For these modules, packet drops are not tracked directly but are instead calculated indirectly by combining input, output, and filtered packet counts.
• In contrast, in ESXi 7.0.3 and earlier versions, packet drops within these IOChains were not included in the final port-level drop counters. This meant that some legitimate drops were not being accounted for in the statistics.
  
  

Resolution

• For customers monitoring these counters, it is recommended to ignore the small, initial reported drops that appear right after the migration. These are an artifact of the changed accounting method and do not indicate a real performance problem.
• The key metric to watch is the trend. If the "Receive Packets Dropped" counter shows a significant and continuous increase over time, it should then be investigated as a genuine network issue. In such a case, please proceed with standard network troubleshooting to identify the root cause of the real packet loss.