How to have Solaris 10 x86 VM running within ESXi recognize vNICs

I’ve installed Solaris 10 on ESXi as a virtual machine.

# uname –a SunOS unknown 5.10 Generic_147441-01 i86pc i386 i86pc

After finishing the installation , I added two additional vNICs to the VM.
However Solaris VM does not seem to recognize vNICs I added to the VM.

The VM has totally three vNICs ( driver is e1000 )
e1000g0 is the vNIC I added when installing Solaris.

# ifconfig  e1000g0 e1000g0: flags=1004843<UP,BROADCAST,RUNNING,MULTICAST,DHCP,IPv4> mtu 1500 index 2        inet 192.168.11.215 netmask ffffff00 broadcast 192.168.11.255        ether aa:aa

There are no two vNICs I added to the VM after the installation

bash-3.2# ifconfig  e1000g1 ifconfig: status: SIOCGLIFFLAGS: e1000g1: no such interface bash-3.2# ifconfig  e1000g2 ifconfig: status: SIOCGLIFFLAGS: e1000g2: no such interface

dmesg

bash-3.2# dmesg | grep e1000g | grep register Dec 26 22:37:06 unknown mac: [ID 469746 kern.info] NOTICE: e1000g0 registered Dec 26 22:37:37 unknown mac: [ID 469746 kern.info] NOTICE: e1000g1 registered Dec 26 22:37:37 unknown mac: [ID 469746 kern.info] NOTICE: e1000g2 registered Dec 26 22:37:59 unknown mac: [ID 736570 kern.info] NOTICE: e1000g1 unregistered Dec 26 22:37:59 unknown mac: [ID 736570 kern.info] NOTICE: e1000g2 unregistered

check “/etc/path_to_inst” file

bash-3.2# egrep e1000 /etc/path_to_inst "/pci@0,0/pci15ad,790@11/pci15ad,750@0" 0 "e1000g" "/pci@0,0/pci15ad,790@11/pci15ad,750@2" 1 "e1000g" "/pci@0,0/pci15ad,790@11/pci15ad,750@3" 2 "e1000g"

Seen from the logs , the VM seems to recognize vNICs at the hardware level.

enable e1000g1 and e1000g2 with ifconfig.

bash-3.2# ifconfig e1000g1 plumb bash-3.2# ifconfig e1000g2 plumb

The VM has recognized all vNICs

bash-3.2# ifconfig e1000g1 e1000g1: flags=1000842<BROADCAST,RUNNING,MULTICAST,IPv4> mtu 1500 index 3        inet 0.0.0.0 netmask 0        ether zz:zz bash-3.2# ifconfig e1000g2 e1000g2: flags=1000842<BROADCAST,RUNNING,MULTICAST,IPv4> mtu 1500 index 4        inet 0.0.0.0 netmask 0        ether zz:zz

Seen from the man of “ifconfig” , it describes :

plumb         Open the device associated with the  physical  interface         name  and  set  up  the streams needed for IP to use the         device. When used with a logical  interface  name,  this         command  is  used  to  create  a  specific named logical         interface. An interface must be separately  plumbed  for         use  by IPv4 and IPv6. The address_family parameter con-         trols whether the ifconfig command applies  to  IPv4  or         IPv6.         Before an interface has been plumbed, the interface will         not show up in the output of the ifconfig -a command.