How to rename vmkernel Portgroup interface name?

[nava_thulasi39]

Hi,

This is in server ESX 3.5

When creating the port group, it happened the interface name vmk1 for vmotion portgroup. But the other host has vmk0.

Is there any way to change the vmkernel interface name to vmk0.

[a_nut_in]

Hey Nava,

vmk0 and vmk1 etc are allocated sequentially.

So if you have a Management and a vMotion vmkernel interface, first create the management - vmk0 will be picked up and then create vMotion.

Not sure if vmk numbers can be changed on the fly. Delete and recreate shold work fine

Regards

Ayan

[nava_thulasi39]

Thanks for the quick reply.

vmk0, vmk1.. created sequentially. But even you delete one portgroup (VMKernel) and create a new one, it goes with the new interface (ex: from vmk1 to vmk2).

I am just looking for, is there any option to rename it previous interface name?

[a_nut_in]

Not that I know of to be honest. Portgroups, you can rename (management network, virtual machine network) but not the vmkernel ports (vmk0, vmk1) themselves as far as I can tell.

The esx configurations are stored in the /etc/vmware/esx.conf and if we do a search for vmk0 etc we can see the vmkernel interfaces. Manually renaming does not seem to work as post restart, the settings revert back.

So not sure there's an easy way to do this apart from maybe playing around with the state.tgz and see if that helps

[nava_thulasi39]

Thanks for the efforts.

[SjorsH]

By combining the 2 following web artikels:
https://www.yellow-bricks.com/2021/06/14/how-do-i-change-the-name-of-a-vswitch-with-vsphere-7-0-u2-and-higher/
https://williamlam.com/2021/07/introduction-to-the-new-esxi-configuration-store-cli-configstorecli.html

I ended up with:
1. configstorecli config current get -c esx -g network -k vmknics > vmknics.json
2. edit vmknics.json ; rename vmk0 to vmk1 ; save
3. configstorecli config current set -c esx -g network -k vmknics -j vmknics.json --overwrite
4. restart the host

This works from version ESXi version 7.0 and up.

Good luck.