Hotplug NIC on ESXi 5
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I have a PF 2.0 running in a vSphere 5 cluster. It already has several E1000 NICs. I have added another one and would like to avoid a reboot.
Is there a way of telling the OS to rescan the PCI bus or something?
Cheers
Jon -
I am not sure if there is a way or not, but I would not and just suffer the reboot. There might be holes in security if you try to hotadd into pfsense.
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I am not sure if there is a way or not, but I would not and just suffer the reboot. There might be holes in security if you try to hotadd into pfsense.
OK thanks. I'll start filling in change requests …
Cheers
Jon -
It wouldn't be a security risk, but the OS itself will just not see it until you reboot. Those types of NICs are only probed at bootup and wouldn't show up if added while the VM was running. In some cases, adding hardware like that could potentially panic the OS.
That isn't the case with dynamic hardware (USB, cardbus, etc) but those are special cases and not something you'd want to use for NICs, especially in a VM.
I don't think freebsd even has expresscard hotplug support.
So, long story short, it's best to power off the VM, add the NIC, then boot it back up.
Or use VLANs, but in ESX it's generally best to use virtual NICs/vswitches rather than VLANs.
