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ActInt
Contributor
Contributor

Intermittent freezes when accessing some VMs via network

Hello,

I'm running a two host, three data store cluster here and I'm noticing a strange (and annoying) behavior with quite a few VMs that I host. Those VMs are running on ESXi 5.0 hosts and are using Windows 2008 R2 or Windows 2012 as hosts.

They are configured to act as network servers, providing network share or remote desktop services to a variety of clients.

What happens is that the network service are not responding or very slowly until I connect to the Console via VSphere Client and login into the guest operating system. When this happens, it takes a long time for the guest to "wake up" and after I've been able to login, all is back to normal on the network service connectivity side.

I have configured Windows own sleep strategy to "Never" so that it does not turn itself off.

I have also installed the latest VMWare tools on every guest OS.

I must have misconfigured my VMs but I can't figure out what could be the parameter that I missed.

Any help would be greatly appreciated.

Regards


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Alim786
Expert
Expert

Please provide details on Host NICs and VM vNICs type. Also provide details of vSwitch config and port group.

VCP6-DCV, VCP5, CCNA, MCTS 2008R2, MCSA 2008R2, CCA, ITIL. Please mark answer helpful or correct as appropriate.
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ActInt
Contributor
Contributor

Host NIC is a gigabit network card, and all VMs are using the E1000 kind of network card.

As to vSwitch config, I'm not sure how to give you the details you require.

However, your question about VM NICs type made me think and I changed a few of them to use the VMXNET3 kind of network card, and since I have done this, I am no longer seeing the freezes on the machines where I made the change.

It is, however, annoying to change this via the vSphere client because the only option I could find was to delete the existing E1000 card and add a new VMXNET3 card. And despite setting the new one to use the same MAC address than the old one, the guest OSes noticed the difference and I had to set the interface up again.

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tomtom901
Commander
Commander

It's a different device, so you indeed have to reset this. Please do note that the VMXNET3 adapter is only available with VMware tools, and it has a few other advantages (sharing a ring bus with the VMkernel, which provides for higher throughput, and it's a 10 GbE NIC). Best practice is when possible, to use this NIC over E1000 or E1000E.

Happy holidays!

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