Home / server / Questions / 539881
Accepted
Omnomnomnom
Asked: 2013-09-19 04:10:54 +0800 CST

VMware ESX: Unable to delete PortGroup. 1 active ports

  • 772

At work we have an ESX 4.1 cluster with some vlan's (Port Groups) configured on a vswitch on each host. A lot of these port groups aren't in use anymore so we decided to clean them up.

We don't have a distributed vswitch, so each port group has to be removed on each host. This works fine in most cases. But we have one group that refuses to be deleted. It returns the following error: "Unable to delete portgroup "VLAN-XXXX", for the following reasons: 1 active ports"

We've tried deleting it through the vcenter console, as well as using the esxcfg-vswitch command. With the same result.

We checked multiple times that none of the VM's on the host are using the portgroup. So I don't think it should be active.

When we check the vswitch using esxcfg-vswitch -l, the output shows that one port in that PortGroup is indeed in use. Does anyone know how to get rid of this one used port?

networking

2 Answers

  1. Can you simply post a screenshot of the Configuration->Network->Virtual Switch configuration page on the host in question.

    enter image description here

    You should be able to see which VMs are using the port group. If you can't see from there, you can use the vSphere Client's "network view" by visiting Home->Inventory->Networking and drilling down to the actual portgroup's name. Selecting the "Virtual Machines" tab will show you everything using that portgroup. THe offending VM may be a template or simply powered-off...

    enter image description here

    • 3
  2. Best Answer

    So I got this to work. This is how it went:

    • User Chopper3 suggested I try to remove the portgroup with the host in maintenance mode.
    • I moved all of the guests somewhere else and tried to put the host in maintenance mode.
    • The operation timed out.
    • So I rebooted the host, it rebooted just fine.
    • After that I was able to delete the portgroup

    Thanks for the help guys!

    • 1