i believe i’ve experienced this exact same problem at least 3 times all because i keep repeating the same mistake. the problem is that i’m unable to ping the IP address of the service console no matter how much i mess around with recreating the vswif, verifying/changing networking settings, disabling/reenabling the vswif, trying different vmnics, restarting networking, the list goes on. the mistake i keep making is changing the VLAN ID of the Service Console port group. that particular VLAN ID needs to stay as 0.

so this time i made sure to write it down before i experience this a 4th time. but on a positive note, in process of trying to resolve my problem i stumbled upon a more user-friendly method of setting up service consoles. vsphere 4u2 ships with a menu based utility named “console-setup” . much more convenient to use than the esxcfg* commands.

sources:
http://kb.vmware.com/selfservice/microsites/search.do?language=en_US&cmd=displayKC&externalId=1000258

http://kb.vmware.com/selfservice/microsites/search.do?cmd=displayKC&docType=kc&docTypeID=DT_KB_1_1&externalId=1000266

http://kb.vmware.com/selfservice/documentLinkInt.do?micrositeID=&popup=true&languageId=&externalID=1003796