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No network connectivity if all ports are in use

Details

  • Virtual machines lose network connection after vMotion.
  • After several successful vMotion migrations to the same host, many of the virtual machines lose network connectivity.
  • Connect is not selected for the virtual machine's VMNIC. Reselecting Connect restores network connectivity.
  • The Event log and Events in VirtualCenter show the error:

    Failed to initialize ethernet0
  • The vmware.log file for the virtual machines that lost connectivity shows the error:

    [msg.ethernet.openFailed] Failed to initialize ethernet0
  • The VMkernel log on the host to which the virtual machines were migrated shows the error:

    can't connect device: `port group name`: Out of resources

Solution

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 do not show up in the output of the esxcfg-vswitch -l command. Each virtual network adapter in a virtual machine connected to the vswitch, each port group, and each NIC uplink uses one port. There are several more ports used by the vswitch that are hidden to the user.
 
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 ESX/ESXi hosts in the cluster is the same.
  • If VLAN is configured, ensure that VLAN is present on all the ESX/ESXi 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.

Tags

lose-network-connectivity loss-of-connectivity network-connection no-network-vmotion

Update History

03/17/2011 - Added symptom and changed the title

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