Distributed Ports Greyed Out in vCenter After Replacing ESXi Host PCI NIC

Products

• VMware vSphere ESXi

Issue/Introduction

After replacing a faulty PCI NIC on an ESXi host, portions of the vDS virtual configuration are lost. The affected distributed ports appear greyed out in the vCenter Server UI and cannot be modified or reconfigured by the administrator.

Environment

VMware vCenter Server 8.x
VMware vSphere ESXi 8.x

Cause

The root cause is a synchronization failure between the vCenter Server vDS configuration and the ESXi host proxy switch. Replacing the physical PCI NIC alters the hardware MAC address and PCI bus binding. This hardware change invalidates the existing vmnic uplink mapping on the vDS, preventing the host proxy switch from initializing the distributed ports and causing them to enter an unmodifiable state in the UI.

Resolution

1. Place the affected ESXi host into Maintenance Mode.

2. Navigate to the vSphere Distributed Switch in the vCenter Server UI and remove the affected ESXi host from the vDS.

3. Re-add the ESXi host to the vDS.

4. During the host addition workflow, map the new PCI NIC (vmnic) to the correct logical uplinks.

5. Reassign and verify the port group configurations for all associated VMkernel adapters and virtual machines on the host.