Order network cards ESXi mixed up

[MarcelMerk]

Hello,

I am having an issue with my setup.

Running the setup in Esxi

VMGuest 2 NICs - OPNsense running fine
Adding 1 NIC - Still ok
Adding another NIC everything stopped working.

After some investigation I found that the order of the NIC is changed. I found the article https://forum.opnsense.org/index.php?topic=27023.msg145910#msg145910 but can not get that to work

My goal is to setup OPNSense with mulplte vNIC but is seems to keep on reordering my NICs.

[Gauss23]

As I remember using VMXnet adapters is causing this error. Try E1000 adapters.

[MarcelMerk]

Thanks will try that and let you know

[MarcelMerk]

I tried this but have the same results as with the vmxnet cards.

I started adding the NIcs to the config. One by one while machine was running. All was working correctly until I shut down the machine. And boote dit up again. Then all broke.

Seems that all MAC addresses are intact, but I think it might be something with the PCI device numbering.

B

[MarcelMerk]

Anybody any thoughts on this ?

[Patrick M. Hausen]

Don't change the hardware configuration of a running VM. Create all the virtual network cards you need once and keep the configuration that way. The order will be perfectly stable across reboots. Once you add another device all hell breaks loose.

Known problem. Only fix/workaround *now* to my knowledge is to keep the HW configuration static. And expect to have to adjust settings every other year or so when you really need to add that one more interface.

[Gauss23]

Another workaround is to build a virtual switch on the ESXi host and connect the OPNsense with a VLAN aware network adapter. In this way you can add the interfaces on the OPNsense side via the GUI.
Or use another hypervisor. OPNsense and ESXi seem to not play nice for this use case.