Hi there - first post in here, so please be gentle :-).
We're just in the process of rolling out a clean deployment ESX4.1 into our environment (no previous VMWare installation) using Dell M610 blades at our main office, and M600 blades at what will become our DR site - both sites are hosting the VM disks on Equallogic iSCSI SANs.
I've successfully configured 4 of our M610 blades with ESX 4.1 and they are working fine. These blades have dual onboard NICs, and after the initial ESX install, i was able to go in to the Virtual Switch and add in the second nic as vmnic1 (as the first one had already been detected during setup). This workd fine for the 4 hosts on the M610 blades. However, i've come today to do my first install on one of the older M600 blades and i've hit a problem.
Installation went through without any problems and i was able to add the host into my vCenter. I can change all the settings without a problem (have created the VMKernal Port for my iSCSI SAN connection etc, but as soon as i try to add in the second NIC, it pauses for a while, and then i get the following error message:
Call "HostNetworkSystem.UpdateVirtualSwitch" for object "networkSystem-56" on vCenter Server "VCEN01.ournetwork.local" failed. (network name has been changed for post). When this happens, it again locks up for several seconds, and when the system comes back, i can no longer communicate with the ESX host (event viewer in vCenter shows "Host is not responding" and i find that i cant ping the host unless i reboot it.
If anyone has any suggestions i'd appreciate it as i dont want to proceed to far down the line with our setup in case theres an underlying issue and i need to redo everything.
Regards
Efin.