Unexpected LOM ports appear in ESXi during Auto Deploy on Cisco servers

Products

• VMware vCenter Server

Issue/Introduction

Stateless ESXi hosts deployed via Auto Deploy detect physical onboard interfaces (e.g., LOM Port 1 and LOM Port 2) that are not configured in the host profile or intended for use. This occurs even when the host profile is removed or the host is rebooted.

• ESXi host inventory shows more vmnics than expected, ex: four vmnics instead of the expected two.
• Two vNICs appear as disabled and lack a MAC address configuration in vCenter.
• Unexpected MAC addresses are visible in the DCUI or esxcfg-nics -l output.
• Standard vSwitch appears in the runtime configuration despite only a Distributed Switch being defined in the Host Profile.

Environment

• VMware ESXi 7.0.x / 8.0.x
• VMware Auto Deploy (Stateless)
• Cisco UCS C-Series Rack Servers

Cause

ESXi enumerates all hardware devices presented by the system BIOS/CIMC during the boot sequence. On certain Cisco server models, the Dual Embedded Intel X550 10GBASE-T LOM ports are enabled by default in the BIOS. During a stateless Auto Deploy boot, ESXi identifies these PCI devices and assigns them vmnic aliases (e.g., vmnic0, vmnic1) before applying the Host Profile, which may conflict with the intended numbering of virtual interfaces (vNICs) defined in the Cisco Service Profile.

Resolution

To resolve this behavior, the hardware visibility of the onboard ports must be modified at the BIOS/CIMC level.  Contact the server vendor support to modify this setting.

Additional Information

How VMware ESXi determines the order in which network device names are assigned to the devices

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