vmkX not found in the current netstack

A little post for in between, in case you want to do a vmkping with your vMotion vmkerneladapter and get the following error message:

Interface 'vmk4' not found in the current netstack, use '-s vmotion' to specify netstack

The reason for this error message is that the TCP/IP stack of vmk4 has been set to vMotion. If I build a vmkerneladapter and want to use the vMotion service, I still leave the TCP/IP stack set to default and activate the vMotion service on it. Then the classic vmkping works as usual.

Nevertheless, you can also ping in the vMotion TCP/IP stack. Before we start pinging, let’s take a look at our TCP/IP stacks in general with the following command:

esxcli network ip netstack list

Here we can see our default TCP/IP as well as the vMotion stack. Now let’s move on to pinging within the specific network stack, for which we need a more specialized command:

esxcli network diag ping -I vmk4 --netstack=vmotion -H 172.16.9.2. -d -s 8972

We no longer use classic vmkping here, but request the required information in this case jumbo frames with esxcli. In particular, we define the TCP/IP stack in the command with ‘–netstack=vmotion‘.

That’s it for this post, short and sweet. If you have any questions, please use the comment field below. 🙂