iDRAC vSwitch Recreated on Reboot Due to OEM Jumpstart Scrip

Products

• VMware vSphere ESXi
• VMware vSphere ESXi 8.0

Issue/Introduction

• An ESXi host continually recreates a converged switch (cswitch) named iDRAC bound to the vusb0 pseudo-NIC after a reboot.
  
  
• This occurs despite explicitly disabling the native BMC network feature, ensuring no stale configurations exist in esx.conf, and verifying that the Dell iDRAC Service Module VIB (dcism) is not installed.
  
  
• The following log signatures are observed in /var/run/log/vmkernel.log

NetPortset: 2236: Activating portset #3 as iDRAC (cswitch) with 9216 ports, index mask is 0x3fff
NetPort: 1621: enabled port 0x600000b with mac <##-##-##-##-##-##>
cswitch: VSwitchActivate:10099: [nsx@6876 comp="nsx-esx" subcomp="vswitch"]Activating switch iDRAC by setting runtime option override.

Environment

VMware vSphere ESXi

Cause

• An OEM Jumpstart script bundled within the Dell-customized ESXi ISO is reacting to the hardware-level presentation of the virtual USB device (vusb0).
  
  
• The script forcefully injects the network configuration during the host boot sequence because the "OS to iDRAC Pass-Through" feature is enabled on the physical Baseboard Management Controller.

Resolution

To resolve the issue, please contact Dell Hardware Support for alignment before proceeding with the maintenance.

• Log in to the out-of-band iDRAC web interface of the affected physical server and disable the iDRAC Service Module Setup.
  
  
• Perform a graceful reboot of the ESXi host to commit this hardware-level configuration change.
  
  
• This action removes the vusb0 pseudo-NIC presentation to the hypervisor, successfully preventing the execution of the Jumpstart script.

Additional Information

Reconfigure Dell iDRAC USB NIC address