I installed the latest version of Vmware Server on a brand new HP Proliant ML350 G5 Server running Windows Server 2003 Enterprise R2.  I created a virtual MS Exchange 2003 Server as a guest on the host.  The guest network is bridged to the host. Everything was working well at first, and then something changed...

The first issue I had is that one of the default Vmnet adapters was automatically assigned an IP subnet that conflicted with a WAN subnet we had in place.  I changed the IP address of Vmnet adapter without any apparent issues, but I had not rebooted any of the virtual servers since that time.

The only network topology canges I made was I unplugged the host server from a 100MB port on the switch to a 1GB port.  Again, I did not reboot immediately after making this change.

Finally, I installed Windows Server 2003 Service Pack 2 on the guest and host.  After rebooting, I began having severe networking issues with the guest and host related to Active Directory. 

I can ping both ways on both the guest and host using their respective IP addresses and FQDNs.  However, I cannot access the guest from the host using RDP (something I used to be able to do) and I cannot make RPC calls from the guest to the host.  It takes alost 30 minutes for the virtual Exchange server to reboot, and it is hit or miss as to whether Exchange will even start (MS Exchange System Attendant Service).

I made changes on the host to disable TCP Offloading (RSSEnable=0), but this has not improved the situation.  I have also uninstalled Vmware Server from the host (keeping the license information), rebooted, and then reinstalled Vmware Server.  Still, I am having trouble with Vmware's network bridging.  It seems as though network communications between the host and guest are being partially restricted, and NO firewall software is running on either device.

If any of you have any suggestions, I would really appreciate some help with this.

Thank You,

Jay