One of my ESX Servers’ management NICs died today, right as I was to start upgrading to ESX 3.0.2. I don’t have the admin NICs in a redundant configuration yet, and it’s fairly inconvenient to lose management capabilities as you’re about to need VMotion.

Luckily[0] I had an extra, unused NIC, esxcfg-nics, and esxcfg-vswitch. With these commands you can display and alter the settings for the NICs and virtual switches from the console.

So, you find out what you have available with “esxcfg-nics -l”

Then you look at the relationships between the virtual switches and the NICs using “esxcfg-vswitch -l”

Since vmnic3 isn’t being used I ran:

esxcfg-vswitch --unlink=vmnic0 vSwitch0
esxcfg-vswitch --link=vmnic3 vSwitch0


And back up it came.

[0] Not too much luck, though, since I intentionally have a spare NIC in all the boxes, just in case of emergency.