ESX 2.5.4: Prevent NIC agent from reporting on specific unplugged NIC ports

[Simon Forster]

We are required to use DL585 servers that have been fitted with 4x Dual-port NICs. At the moment we are only using 4 of the 8 available ports and the extra four ports are showing as link failures in the System Management agents 7.70 for ESX 2.5.x.

Does anybody know a way to stop reporting these four ports as down without actually disabling the unused ports. We would like to maintain monitoring of the four currently used ports.

It is likely that the NIC ports will be utilised in the near future and we have been requested to modify our monitoring without an outage rather than have to schedule full downtime to disable the NICs.

I have done a lot of googling and also reviewed the product documentation as well as the configuration files in /opt/compaq... but have not been able to find a suitable solution.

Thank you very much for any assistance

Simon

[Rob Buxton]

You could try sourcing some loop back connectors.
These fool the NIC into thinking there's a connection.