The MAC for the NIC is assigned from the Default MAC address pool for the VM. Now i need to add an additional NIC for the VM with a static MAC too. I've executed the follwing command after adding the NIC to the VM to assign a static MAC address. MAC learning enables network connectivity for multiple MAC addresses behind a single vNIC. MAC learning is useful for distributing workloads in large OpenStack deployments. MAC learning in VMware Integrated OpenStack is implemented differently for NSX-T Data Center and NSX Data Center for vSphere deployments.

The ReconfigVM method does not care if the new MAC address is a valid VMware MAC address. It does not even seem to care if the new MAC address string is a valid hex MAC address. So, use with care - one would not want to break networking on their precious VM by setting its NIC to have an invalid MAC address, or a duplicate, etc. Modifying VNIC MAC Addresses. Any VNIC that a user creates can only have one MAC address. You can modify the MAC address by using the dladm modify-vnic command. You can configure the VNICs created for kernel zones with one or more MAC addresses.

I recently stumbled upon this issue when adding some new vNICs for use with a new iSCSI storage array. I followed the usual order of operations for our UCS B-series blades: create new vNIC templates, add the vNICs to the LAN Connectivity Policy in UCS Manager, put first vSphere host in the cluster into maintenance mode, shut down and then hit blinky “pending actions” light in UCS to reboot the corresponding service profile. Host comes back up, take it out of maintenance mode and let DRS migrate some VMs back over. Only this time, the vMotion process kept failing VMs trying to go back over to this updated host.

Hack computer with use of mac address. Luckily, I was already working on another issue at the same time with Cisco TAC when this reared its ugly head. We took a look and after a while saw that after adding the two vNICs and rebooting, the vmnics came up a little bit out of order in vSphere:

In UCS, I had created the MAC pools to reference vmnics by either Fabric A or B and corresponding vmnic number. Highlighted above, we saw that vmnic8 was showing a MAC address with aa:a4, which meant it “should” actually be vmnic4 rather than vmnic8. It just so happens that vmnic was one of my vMotion uplinks. TAC mentioned that this was a known issue that was still yet to be resolved between Cisco and VMware. They pointed me to a Cisco bug article that referenced a VMware KB for the fix:

The KB shows to SSH into the vSphere host with the ordering issue and run “localcli –plugin-dir /usr/lib/vmware/esxcli/int/ deviceInternal alias list” to output the vmnic aliases and their corresponding bus address:

Per the article, you change the alias assigned to a particular bus address by running another local-cli command. In this instance, I ran the command:

localcli –plugin-dir /usr/lib/vmware/esxcli/int/ deviceInternal alias store –bus-type pci –alias vmnic4 –bus-address s00000000:07:00

Which is basically saying change the bus address that is currently assigned to vmnic8 to use the alias vmnic4. In the first screenshot, it shows that what is vmnic8 really should be vmnic4 based on the MAC address.

The command had to be run again four more times (of course using the cli syntax):

change alias vmnic4 to vmnic5
change alias vmnic5 to vmnic6
change alias vmnic6 to vmnic7
change alias vmnic7 to vmnic8

vmnic9 was correct, so after making all the alias changes, the host was rebooted again and came back up showing the proper order:

The host came out of maintenance mode, vMotions worked fine and all was right with the world.

I haven’t done much digging to see if this indeed is a known issue based on certain versions of vSphere/UCS, so if anyone else has run into this before or has any info other than what I heard from TAC in that it is has yet to be worked out between VMware and Cisco, definitely post a comment with any updates.

Note

This plugin is part of the community.network collection.

To install it use: ansible-galaxy collection install community.network.

To use it in a playbook, specify: community.network.dladm_vnic.

Synopsis

Mac Addresses Lookup

How To Find Mac Addresses

Create or delete VNICs on Solaris/illumos systems.

Parameters

Parameter	Choices/Defaults	Comments
link	VNIC underlying link name.
mac	Default: 'no'	Sets the VNIC's MAC address. Must be valid unicast MAC address.
name string / required
state string	Choices: absent	Create or delete Solaris/illumos VNIC.
temporary	Choices: no ← yes	Specifies that the VNIC is temporary. Temporary VNICs do not persist across reboots.
vlan	Default: 'no'	Enable VLAN tagging for this VNIC. The VLAN tag will have id vlan.

Examples

Return Values

Common return values are documented here, the following are the fields unique to this module:

Key	Returned	Description
link string	always	Sample:
mac string	if mac is specified	Sample:
name string	always	Sample:
state string	always	Sample:
temporary boolean	always	Sample:
vlan integer	success	Sample:

Vendor Mac Addresses

Authors

Adam Števko (@xen0l)

Vnic Mac Addresses Manualdwnloadblock Email

© 2012–2018 Michael DeHaan
© 2018–2019 Red Hat, Inc.
Licensed under the GNU General Public License version 3.
https://docs.ansible.com/ansible/2.10/collections/community/network/dladm_vnic_module.html