How to enable or disable vmnic on esxi

As you know VMware UI has no option you to change the link situation up or down via browser. If you are far away or work remotely you should know how to get answer you needs.

On my case, I needed to create a new vswitch and link to a vmic, there were two available vmic but i didnt know which is plugged to which port on my switch. I tried to find the port using the mac address of the nic, but Ruijie switch showed nothing.

I could find the port uf I had assigned the new network to a vm, then switch would showed me the right port number because i would had an option to follow the running vm mac address on the switch.

To check NIC link status from the ESXi service console
Run this command:

esxcli network nic list

The output should come up similar to:

Name    PCI Device    Driver   Admin Status  Link Status  Speed  Duplex  MAC Address         MTU  Description
------  ------------  -------  ------------  -----------  -----  ------  -----------------  ----  -----------
vmnic0  0000:5d:00.0  bnxtnet  Up            Down             0  Half    f4:03:43:db:84:60  1500  Broadcom BCM57414 NetXtreme-E 10Gb/25Gb RDMA Ethernet Controller
vmnic1  0000:5d:00.1  bnxtnet  Up            Down             0  Half    f4:03:43:db:84:68  1500  Broadcom BCM57414 NetXtreme-E 10Gb/25Gb RDMA Ethernet Controller
vmnic2  0000:86:00.0  bnxtnet  Up            Down             0  Half    f4:03:43:de:be:20  1500  Broadcom BCM57414 NetXtreme-E 10Gb/25Gb RDMA Ethernet Controller
vmnic3  0000:86:00.1  bnxtnet  Up            Down             0  Half    f4:03:43:de:be:28  1500  Broadcom BCM57414 NetXtreme-E 10Gb/25Gb RDMA Ethernet Controller
vmnic4  0000:af:00.0  ntg3     Up            Up            1000  Full    98:f2:b3:1f:4b:dc  1500  Broadcom Corporation NetXtreme BCM5719 Gigabit Ethernet
vmnic5  0000:af:00.1  ntg3     Up            Up             100  Full    98:f2:b3:1f:4b:dd  1500  Broadcom Corporation NetXtreme BCM5719 Gigabit Ethernet
vmnic6  0000:af:00.2  ntg3     Up            Up            1000  Full    98:f2:b3:1f:4b:de  1500  Broadcom Corporation NetXtreme BCM5719 Gigabit Ethernet
vmnic7  0000:af:00.3  ntg3     Up            Up             1000  Full    98:f2:b3:1f:4b:df  1500  Broadcom Corporation NetXtreme BCM5719 Gigabit Ethernet

I needed to use vmnic7 and logged in my esxi server using ssh with root account and ran the following commands. On the other hand, I followed the terminal monitor activities on ruijie.

esxcli network nic down -n vmnic7
esxcli network nic up -n vmnic7

VMNic7 is plugged to port number 11 on the Ruijie switch. Result as below.

Thanks for reading, and have a good day.

Hasan