Hello Mikrotik team,
I have the following problem and it is not only with 6.40.4 but with any previous CHR/x86 version I tested.
On CHR that was tested with E1000/VMXNET3
On X86 that was tested with E1000/E1000E
What happens is that each time I do a "/system reset-configuration skip-backup=yes no-defaults=yes keep-users=no" during the initial boot of the OS the systems arranges the interfaces in different order not correlated at all to the picSlotNumber or the order of the MAC addresses.
I am running on the latest ESXi 6.5 Update 1 platform within a vCenter server 6.5.
1) I checked in the .vmx file and the pciSlotNumber for each interface is properly set where ethernet0 has the lowest number and the following devices have the number increased by 1.
2) I tried assigning incremented MAC addresses in proper order to each NIC, guessing it might help RouterOS assign their names properly, but still without success.
3) I noticed that when using 8 network interfaces the first and the last one are being switched.
4) I also noticed after removing ethernet0 interface and leaving all other starting from ethernet1 solves the issue.
5) During my testing I used "/interfaces ethernet print detail" to get detailed information, and right after reboot I noticed that sometimes, the system would initially show no interfaces and it takes 2-3 seconds for interfaces to start appearing. During initial boot interfaces that are assigned as Network Interface 4 or Network Interface 5 would appear first and would be assigned ether1 and ether2 first. Then another group of two interfaces would appear in the list and they will be assigned ether3 and ether4 respectively. That behaviour seems to change as on each reboot with reset-configuration the RouterOS sees different interfaces first and it doesn't follow any order 1) to which they are defined in the VM guest /pci order/ or 2) to which the MAC addresses are sorted.
It would be nice if this behaviour is changed as while the name of the interface could be adjusted to our liking we still need to rely on proper default-name for scripting and other purposes.
The best behaviour would be for RouterOS to respect the pciSlotNumber as this reflects the number of the addition of the device in VMware.
~Cheers~