6.5.1

Table Of Contents
Solution
1 In the vSphere Web Client, navigate to the host.
2 On the Configure tab, expand the System group of settings.
3 Select Advanced System Settings and click Edit.
4 Type the physical adapters that you want to use outside the scope of Network I/O Control as a
comma-separated list for the Net.IOControlPnicOptOut parameter.
For example: vmnic2,vmnic3
5 Click OK to apply the changes.
6 In the vSphere Web Client, add the physical adapter to the distributed switch.
Troubleshooting SR-IOV Enabled Workloads
Under certain conditions, you might experience connectivity or power-on problems with virtual machines
that use SR-IOV to send data to physical network adapters.
SR-IOV Enabled Workload Cannot Communicate After You
Change Its MAC Address
After you change the MAC address in the guest operating system of an SR-IOV enabled virtual machine,
the virtual machine loses connectivity.
Problem
When you connect the network adapter of a virtual machine to an SR-IOV virtual function (VF), you create
a passthrough network adapter for the virtual machine. After the (VF) driver in the guest operating system
modifies the MAC address for the passthrough network adapter, the guest operating system shows that
the change is successful but the VM network adapter loses connectivity. Although the guest operating
system shows that the new MAC address is enabled, a log message in the /var/log/vmkernel.log file
indicates that the operation has failed.
Requested mac address change to new MAC address on port VM NIC port number, disallowed by vswitch
policy.
where
n
new MAC address is the MAC address in the guest operation system.
n
VM NIC port number is the port number of the VM network adapter in hexadecimal format.
Cause
The default security policy on the port group to which the passthrough network adapter is connected does
not allow changes in the MAC address in the guest operating system. As a result, the networking
interface in the guest operating system cannot acquire an IP address and loses connectivity.
vSphere Troubleshooting
VMware, Inc. 94