Is this how I disable nic monitoring on a ESX 3.01 Host Server?

[Dana Swanson]

Hi Everyone,

Were running the HP Agents 7.7.0 for VMware ESX Server 3.x

I've been looking through the posts on how to disable a few different "agents" in ESX 3.x.

Should the following work if I don't want the network cards/ports monitored by snmp or available on the SMH?

service hpasm stop
vi /opt/compaq/cma.conf
Add “cmanic” to the line “exclude cmhp cpqrid”
Line should read:
exclude cmhp cpqrid cmanic
Save the file
service hpasm start

Wondering if this looks good or if I should add
"cmanicd" to the exclude as well.

Thanks!

Dana

[Dana Swanson]

I took a look at our ESX servers and noticed one was still in maint. mode after a hardware fix.

I tried this out with excluding cmanic and the NIC Agents still ran. I tried exluding both cmanic and cmanicd but they still started.

Is there another file I can edit to exclude the NIC Agents from starting up?

Thanks!

Dana

[Dana Swanson]

Just a FYI:

I tried a:
service hpasm stop
chkconfig cmanic off
service hpasm start

The nic agents still ran.

Dana

[James Kennedy_5]

Did you ever find a way to disable NICs on ESX 3.x?

I'm having the same problem on all of my ESX servers, we aren't using all the NICs, so the servers always show up as degraded.

[James Kennedy_5 · Accepted solution]

I was able to figure it out, if anyone else runs into this problem, here's the way to do it.

1) SSH console into your ESX server
2) login or su as root
3) type "ifconfig"

This will list out all the NICs on the server. You may have to match up MAC address to find the one you want to disable. I just looked for the NICs that have a TX and RX of 0.

4) type "ifconfig nic down" (where NIC is the name of the NIC you want to disable).

[Dana Swanson]

Thanks James,

I called VMWare with this question and the person I spoke to said the NIC card ports could not be disabled in ESX 3.x.

I'm glad you were able to figure it out. Do the NIC ports stay disabled after you reboot the server? Or did you add the "ifconfig nic down" commands to a script someplace?

VMWare did give me an interesting solution. Connect one nic port to another nic port with a crossover cable. The network ports can then communicate and the status goes to green.

The new Gigabit network card standard will let you can use a normal CAT6 cable and the NIC will auto configure itself to use the normal cable as a crossover cable.

Thanks again!

Dana

[James Kennedy_5]

If you reboot the server, the NICs renable themselves. Luckily, these servers aren't rebooted very often, but yes still annoying. There might be a way to script it, but I haven't looked into that yet.

Also, it appears this doesnt' always work 100%. For some reason half my ESX servers still show up in the orange. It might be a PSP version issue, i'm still checking on that.

In the end, it's probably best to do some type of loopback for a real permanent solution.

[Dana Swanson]

Hi James,

We only had a few servers needing crossover cables so it wasn't that bad.

Just to note a loopback connector, the small 10BaseT connector with the proper wires crossed didn't work on our servers with gigabit ports. They did work but caused crosstalk so packet errors were detected on the ports and they were flagged minor (yellow) instead of major (orange).

What I did was run an actual standard cat6 network cable from one empty port to another empty port so the nic cards thought they were on a live network. That solved the problem.

See ya,

Dana

[Scarf And Tea]

We added the following line to the /etc/rc.d/rc.local file.

/sbin/ifconfig vmnicX down &

works fine but one of our hosts keeps on reactivating the disabled nics. It is as if some process caused the network stack to reload.

loopbacks are out of the question because we are running BL460c with quad port mezzanine cards and 4 virtual connects. In order to avoid a down should we add the remaining two virtual connects and enable more nics, we configured server profiles with 6 nics so there is no way for us to disable the superfluous nics in the BIOS.

Anyone has an idea as to what actually reenables these network cards ?

Regards,
Jerome