Disable unused embedded NICs

[Daniel Ryan2]

I have a C7000 enclosure with BL460c G6 servers installed. I am running VMware ESXi 4.0 update2 on some of these hosts. I want to diable two of the network ports on the embedded nics as HP SIM is showing a Major health alert on these ports. The ports are not required for production.

Can you please advise how to disable the ports, or how to set an ignore on the HP SIM health alert?

[Ali]

Hi Daniel,

You may disable the embedded NICs from system bios (RBSU)

to access RBSU, press F9 during boot. however, make sure you have latest system bios to avoid any issues after disabling the NICs.

thanks,
Aftab

[Daniel Ryan2]

I can only disable th Network card in the RBSU not the individual ports. I only want to disable two ports on one card and not the entire card...

[Leo Plewa]

Hello,

please see the following link.
http://forums11.itrc.hp.com/service/forums/questionanswer.do?threadId=1449069
Your problem is covered there.

Regards

[Daniel Ryan2]

Unfortunately the content of the advice in the link provided does not work. Despite including the requested text in the rc.local file the health warning re-appears.
Thanks

[Shashwath_1]

HI...

We you cant disable the physical NIC port in the hardware level. i would suggest you to disable in the OS level. If it is ESX then you can create V-NIC and disable the NIC Port.

Regards,
Shashwath

[dgerol]

I have managed to do this by defining new networks in VCM named "Unused NICs_1", Unused NICs_2" etc. These networks are internal only and are not presented to the SUS.

When you create your VC Server Profile, connect any unused NICs to these networks. The OS will still see them, but they will be "connected" and therefore will not cause a "link down" notification in SMH or SIM.

The only caveat is that you can't have two flex-nics on the same LOM connected to the same network.

This solution, while not as nice as disabling specific flex-nics, works for me because it is OS agnostic.

For non-blades (DL380), if there are any physical ports unused, I copnnect a crossover cable between them so as to get a link light.