Change Active Adapters and Load Balancing using ESXi Shell

Anyone ever had a network administrator make your hosts lose connectivity and the only option you have is to use the ESXi shell through an HP ILO port? I have. Here are the changes that were helpful to me at the time.

esxcli network vswitch standard list — This lists all of the vswitches on the host.

esxcli network vswitch standard uplink add -u vmnic1 -v vSwitch0 — Add an uplink to the vswitch. Just switch “add” to “remove” to get rid of a vmnic from the vswitch.

esxcli network vswitch standard policy failover get -v vSwitch0 — Get the load balancing policy for the vSwitch.

esxcli network vswitch standard policy failover set -a vmnic1 -v vSwitch0 — Be careful because when changing the active vmnics on a vswitch it will only add ones that you specify and if there are active ones that you specify it will move them to unused.
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esxcli network vswitch standard portgroup policy failover get -p “Management Network” — This shows the policy information for the portgroup “Management Network”

esxcli network vswitch standard portgroup policy failover set -a vmnic1 -p “Management Network” — Change the active adapter on the Management Network.

esxcli network vswitch standard policy failover set -l iphash -v vSwitch0 — Set the load balancing on the vSwitch0 to iphash. Please be aware that this might change the portgroups to iphash if they are set to get their settings from the vswitch.

esxcli network vswitch standard portgroup policy failover set -l iphash -p “Management Network” — Sets the load balancing policy on the Management Network portgroup to iphash. This will cause the load balancing policy on the vswitch to no longer apply to the Management Network portgroup.