You may experience this issue if the virtual switch has exceeded its number of configured VMkernel ports.
For example, if you have a single virtual switch (that is set to the default of 24 ports for VMware Infrastructure 3, 56 default ports in vSphere) with multiple port groups and virtual machines, but the output of the
esxcfg-vswitch command shows that the virtual switch has 32 configured ports and 32 ports in use, the virtual switch has exceeded its number of configured ports.
Note: Virtual switches have overhead ports that show up in the output of the
esxcfg-vswitch -l command. For more information, see
Reserved or overhead ports for virtual switches (1008040). Each virtual network adapter in a virtual machine connected to the vSwitch, each port group, and each NIC uplink uses one port. The additional overhead is allocated regardless of the number of ports on the virtual switch.
There are several possible resolutions. To resolve this issue, either:
- Increase the number of ports for the virtual switch and reboot the host for the changes to take effect.
Note: VMware recommends that you increase the number of ports for all hosts in a DRS cluster to prevent this issue from occurring on another host.
- Create a new virtual switch and spread the virtual machines and port groups across the two switches.
- If using NIC teaming, ensure that the load balancing policy on all the ESXi/ESX hosts in the cluster is the same.
- If VLAN is configured, ensure that VLAN is present on all the ESXi/ESX hosts in the cluster.
- Ensure that Notify Switches under NIC teaming is set to Yes.
For related information, see
Change the Number of Ports for a vSwitch in the vSphere Online Library.
Additional Information
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