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DavidinCT
Enthusiast
Enthusiast

ESXi 6.5a (newest version), VM is not getting DHCP... any idea ?

Hi,

I have been battling with this one for about 4 days now and have hit a brick wall.  I was trying to get a Motorolla cable modem working but, even with a DHCP server, I got nothing on a VM.  The server is a HP DL380

The VMs are based on Windows 2008 R2 x64. They were on ESXi 5.5 before. THEY WERE NOT MIGRATED OVER.  I formatted the drive, downloaded the NEWEST VERSION of ESXi 6.5a, once installed I manually created drives (size wize)and hardware for each VM, then I booted with an Acronis ISO (with a external USB drive) and retored the servers one by one, then fully updated the Vmware tools). Took many hours to do this but, I found it to be the best way to hanle this. As Veeam trial flaked out and would not restore the VMs.

On the VMware tools, should I have uninstalled the old ones, then installed the newest one ?????

My VMserver has 2 Vlans in it, VLAN 0 for internal traffic, VLAN1 for this connection.

I connected a device to a network port on the server, see that it connected to vmnic5 on my server (shows a connection), created a new vSwitch with VLAN1, then created a new PORT Group for it.

Here is my VLAN config

vSwitch config.JPG

Seems strait forward so far, right ?

Now I got to a VM, and add a new NIC VMXNET 3 (tried the others with no change) and select the new PORT Group. So I boot the 2008 R2 server. The VMware tooks have been updated so no problems there.

The server will see the NIC, install it but, no matter what I connect, A NETWORK cable from a DHCP server, or a Motorolla DOCSYS 3.0 cable modem, the server will only see a 169.254.X.X address (Windows assigned adress when it cant find a DHCP server).  No matter what I try this is all it will get,

Is this an issue with the install of the VMware tooks, or is there a new FIREWALL or something .

Does anyone have an idea what in the world could be causing this ? Loving the new but a hair bit buggy web interface but, with out the basic networking WORKING, I might have to roll back.

Can anyone help here ?

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continuum
Immortal
Immortal

To use vmxnet3 you need to have vmware-tools installed - I assume you already did that.
Can you assign an IP manually and try to ping for example your DHCP-server ?


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DavidinCT
Enthusiast
Enthusiast

The Vmware tools are installed.  I updated them all.

I tried that. I gave the vmxnet3 a IP that was part of my network. I disabled the 2nd NIC on the VM so the vmxnet3 was the only NIC with a connecton. I was unable to ping anything on my network (DNS and IP), and on a machine on my network, I tried to ping the IP and machine name and not able to find it.

It's like there is no connection to the vNIC....

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dineshgoundar
Enthusiast
Enthusiast

Can you check if the uplink from this host (ESXi) has correct network configuration. Is it an access or trunk port? If trunk port, which VLANS are allowed through? Put the static IP back in the VM and ping itself (or loopback address 127.0.0.1) to ensure the IP stack is not corrupted. My suspect is there is a mismatch in network configuration.

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a_p_
Leadership
Leadership

I guess you are hitting the "VLAN 1" issue, where the physical switch port's default VLAN is VLAN1. In this case you must not tag the port group, because the VLAN tag for incoming traffic is already removed by the switch port, i.e. the vSwitch will only see untagged packets, and therefore such packets will not be forwarded to tagged port groups.

The solution (most likely) to this is to remove the VLAN ID on the port group.

André

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