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Certain versions of VMXNET 3 driver fail to initialize the device when the number of vCPUs is not a power of two (2003484)

Details

If the version of VMXNET 3 inbox driver on your Linux distribution is 1.0.25.0-k to 1.1.17.0-k, the driver might fail if the number of vCPUs that you assign to a virtual machine is not a power of two. You might see an error message similar to the following while running the demsg command:

Failed to activate dev eth0:error 1

An error message similar to the following might be written to vmware.log:

VMXNET3 user: failed to activate Ethernet1 with status 0xbad0007

Solution

This issue is resolved in vSphere 5.0 Update 1.
 
Work around the issue as follows:
  1. Overwrite the inbox VMXNET3 driver with VMware Tools driver by running this command:

    # ./vmware-install.pl --clobber-kernel-modules=vmxnet3

  2. Manually load VMware Tools driver with power-of-two number of tx/rx queues so that the number of vCPUs exceed the number of queues. For example, in a virtual machine with 3 vCPUs and 2 VMXNET3 adapters, you can load the driver by running this command:

    modprobe vmxnet3 num_rqs=2,2 num_tqs=2,2
Notes:
  1. If you do not have the option of reloading the driver, use a power of two that is less than the number of vCPUs available when you configure the number of queues.
  2. This issue is resolved in inbox VMXNET 3 driver version 1.1.18.0-k.

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