I'm running a student version of ESXi 6.5 u1 that is essentially the enterprise plus version, but limited to only 1 vhost and no license for vCenter.
I'm having issues with a virtual appliance that has 4 virtual NIC's installed. The vHost is connected to my physical switch with a trunk port that allows all configured VLAN's to traverse the trunk. In the virtual appliance, two NIC's are connected to the same VLAN and the last 2 are connected to different VLAN's for a total of 3 VLANS. When I look a the vswitch view and each VLAN, I see 2 connections in each of the 3 VLAN's and they are the same MAC address of the first two NIC's in the appliance, the last two do not show up at all. If I delete 2 NIC's, the two remaining show in each assigned VLAN as expected. If I add 1 NIC for a total of 3, I get the same behavior. This is not just showing incorrectly, the virtual appliance is also not working as expected in each VLAN. Thought this might just be the appliance having issues so tried an Ubuntu server VM that I created that already had 2 NIC's. When I added the third NIC, it exhibited the same issues.
Troubleshooting:
I have rebooted the appliance and the vhost several times, deleted and re-added the NIC's in various stages to isolate when the issue shows up, tried to upgrade to ESXi 6.7, but my vhost is not compatible with 6.7, reinstalled 6.5 with no difference in behavior and attempted to downgrade. Since a downgrade requires a complete reinstall, I've decided to ask here for options. Any suggestions that require a vCenter server is not an option since my license does not include that. That also means that I am not able to use the software update services unless there's a way to install an update manually (or it doesn't require vCenter Server), but then I'd also have to be able to download the update package(s).
This appears to be a bug in 6.5, but am hoping it's not and there's a fix for it. Any suggestions?
Update:
I've marked the answer from A.P. as the correct answer, but it's really only partially correct. Since my VM wasn't working, and I wasn't seeing the correct output, I assumed I was seeing the same issue. In reality, there were two issues, this one and a configuration issue with the VM itself.
For those that may come by this later, the VM is running GNS3 and I wasn't able to pass traffic on each NIC when configured on separate vlans. I was assigning them correctly, but since I wasn't seeing the correct assignments when I viewed the vSwitch, I assumed that was the issue. Once I enabled promiscuous mode on each NIC on the GNS3 VM, it started working as expected.