Link-State of the PNIC is not propagated to VF on an ESXi with SR-IOV configured on Mellanox NICs

Products

• VMware vSphere ESXi

Issue/Introduction

• On ESXi hosts with SR-IOV configured, when the physical cable is pulled or when the pNIC is shutdown from ESXi CLI using the command:
• esxcli network nic down -n vmnicX, the Virtual Function/vNIC remains up.

Environment

VMware  ESX

Cause

This behavior is consistent with the current design and is not a bug.

Resolution

The VF state is intentionally maintained as "UP" and does not follow the PF link state. This is required to enable VF-to-VF communication on the host.