Physical NIC Replacement for ESXi Hosts in VCF SDDC Environments

Products

• VMware SDDC Manager / VCF Installer

Issue/Introduction

When a physical Network Interface Card (NIC) is replaced on an ESXi host managed by VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) without following the standard decommissioning process, the following issues may occur:

• SDDC Manager Inventory displays hardware mismatches or errors
• Lifecycle Management (LCM) pre-checks fail due to inconsistent hardware attributes (e.g., MAC address changes).
• NSX-T Transport Node configurations may become unstable or fail to sync

Environment

VMware ESXi

VMware Cloud Foundation

Cause

SDDC Manager maintains a record of host hardware attributes (such as NIC device names, MAC addresses, and speeds) in its internal platform database. 
When a physical NIC is replaced, these hardware details change at the physical layer, but the SDDC Manager database is not automatically updated unless the host is decommissioned and re-commissioned.

Resolution

For any planned hardware maintenance, follow the official VCF documentation to ensure database integrity:

1. Decommission the ESXi Host: Remove the host from the workload domain and decommission it from the SDDC Manager inventory. (Decommission Hosts)
2. Perform Physical Replacement: Replace the NIC hardware at the physical server level.
3. Commission the ESXi Host: Re-add the host to the SDDC Manager inventory. (Commission Hosts)