VMware ESXi 3.5, 2nd NIC disconnected?

madhattr23

Hi everyone,

I've inherited managing a Dell PowerEdge 1950 with 2 Broadcom NetXtreme II BCM5708 1000Base-T network cards that's running VMware ESXi 3.5. We are running several vm's on this machine for testing software and I'm having problems getting the second network card to work.

Currently all of our vm's are configured to a virtual switch that is tied to vmnic0 on the system. I've been asked to set up a new vm that would use only the second nic so they could run the network cable to a separate router and save them from having to configure a VLAN to connect it to a separate network.

I created I new a new virtual switch and added vmnic1, but the network adapter reports the link stats as disconnected. I checked with our networking guy and there is a cable connected and we've tried changing cables and ports it's connected to on the router but no change. Currently the adapter is set to Autonegotiate and I've tried changing these settings but still nothing happens. Also, the device is enabled in the BIOS.

Does anyone have any insight into how to troubleshoot this or what I might be missing in the setup. Please excuse my ignorance on the subject my expertise is in software testing and automation but since I'm the only one with prior VMware experience (which wasn't much) I got tasked with this.

Thanks,
Mike

astorrs

As a simple test (assuming nothing is running on the box or if there is that it can sustain the interruption) swap the network cables - plug the new one you don't know anything about into the old NIC and vice-versa assuming you have everything cabled up and the problem is within the host the 1st NIC should light up and the new 2nd NIC should stay dark.

I bet the opposite happens.

JDMurray

Cisco says to start troubleshooting with layer 1 and work your way up. Network problems seem to be mostly in layers 1 and 3, but with VMware you can have common layer 2 mis-configurations as well.

madhattr23

Thanks for the input, I'm going to work with our networking guy to start troubleshooting this today. Hopefully we'll get this figured out by the end of the day and I'll let ya'll know how it turns out.