My lab has two 6.7 hosts connected back to back by a high-speed mellanox interface. Each host has a VSA running, using iSCSI multipathing, so one host going down won't hose the other host. For max performance, each host has a virtual function of the mellanox NIC passed in via SR-IOV. Sadly, I have discovered that if I take either host down (powered off), the still-up host loses link (expected), and the VSA and ESXi are unable to communicate, even though no packet would ever need to leave the box (not expected.) Is there a way to configure a nic/vswitch/vmkernel adapter to ignore the state of link? Or to force it up? Thanks!