Spanning Tree and BPDU Guard

One of our engineers accidentally "bridged" the interfaces in windows. This is done by selecting multiple interfaces and picking "Bridge". This triggered the PortFast Bridge Protocol Data Unit (BPDU) guard feature when the switch saw BPDU traffic on the port. Which disabled all of the ports (backup and production) on the host to isolate and protect the greater network infrastructure. http://www.cisco.com/en/US/tech/tk389/tk621/technologies_tech_note09186a008009482f.shtml This is a good safety mechanism and isolation response but something that may not be obvious at first if you encounter this issue. We were able to correct this by shutting down and disconnecting the network ports of the offending VM through the service console and bringing the ports back up on the Cisco swtich. We still did have link connectivity issues and ended up having to reboot the ESX host. At this point we got all interfaces back and were able to bring up the offending VM, disconnected from any network, delete the bridge, and reconnect to the network with no further issues. Hope this helps if anyone else runs into it.