How to Add Additional Physical NICs to XenServer

Summary

You just added an additional Physical Network Interface Card (NIC) to the XenServer, but it does not show up in the XenCenter. Below is the procedure for how to add additional physical NICs to the XenServer.

Requirement

You must make sure that the NIC(s) is on the Hardware compatibility List (HCL) hcl.xensource.com. If it is on the list then XenServer is supporting the NIC(s). In some cases, even though it is not on the list, the NIC might work, but when you encounter problems, Citrix Technical Support Engineers will do their best to help you, but there is no escalation path.

Procedure

To get the NIC to show in XenCenter, you must follow these steps.

1. From the XenServer Command Line Interface (CLI), issue the following command:
xe pif-list
Press Enter.
Note: If you have more than one XenServers in the pool, you must issue the xe host-list command to list all the XenServer hosts and write down the Universally Unique Identifier (UUID) of the host that you just added the new NIC, then issue command xe pif-list host-uuid=[uuid of the XenServer host]

2. The command above lists all the physical NICs of that XenServer. If you do not see the additional NIC, you must scan for new physical interface(s) on a XenServer and issue this command:
xe pif-scan host-uuid=[uuid of the XenServer host]
Press Enter.

3. Use xe pif-list again and you can see the new NIC.

4. If you see the device of the new NIC with something like this __tmp206888048 you must remove it and introduce so it can recognize in the correct way such as ethX.
xe pif-forget uuid=[uuid of __tmp206888048 that you want to forget]
xe pif-list you won’t see __tmp206888048 anymore.

5. Introduce the additional physical NIC to the XenServer so it can recognize it from the XenCenter.
ifconfig –a
Press Enter.

You should see something similar to this:

ifconfig:
__tmp206888048 Link encap:Ethernet HWaddr 00:15:17:6B:6A:31
UP BROADCAST MULTICAST MTU:1500 Metric:1
RX packets:0 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 frame:0
TX packets:0 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 carrier:0
collisions:0 txqueuelen:1000
RX bytes:0 (0.0 b) TX bytes:0 (0.0 b)

Note: The __tmp206888048 is still there with the MAC address 00:15:17:6B:6A:31. You need to write down the MAC address 00:15:17:6B:6A:31 so later you can introduce that MAC address for the next available NIC device such as ethX.

6. Now you can introduce the new physical NIC(s) to the XenServer.
xe pif-introduce host-uuid=[uuid of the XenServer host] device=[machine-readable name of the interface (for example, eth3)] mac=00:15:17:6B:6A:31
Press Enter.

The command returns a UUID, for example: 83750d2d-dd36-787c-da1c-951d7afc2cf0

7. Plug that new UUID 83750d2d-dd36-787c-da1c-951d7afc2cf0
xe pif-plug uuid=83750d2d-dd36-787c-da1c-951d7afc2cf0
xe pif-list to see the new PIF

8. Go to the XenCenter and you can see the new physical NIC(s) there.