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ejward
Expert
Expert

NIC in Windows guest disappears after upgrading Vmware Tools on reboot.

Over the past week, I upgraded 10 hosts in a cluster from ESXi 5.1 to v5.5 Update 1.  Everything seemed to go well.  The past weekend was Windows patching weekend so, all of our servers rebooted.  About 80 of the 350 VMs in the cluster lost their NIC in the OS.  To fix the issue, I had to do a repair of VMware tools which brought the NIC back.  Then, I had to retype all the static IP address information.  What a pain.

Since I upgraded the underlying host to 5.5 and, the VMs all said VMware tools were current before I did the repair, I am assuming that tools was upgraded when the VM rebooted however, I don't see anything in the logs to that effect.  If the VM is set to upgraded on power on, would that show up in tasks and events?

Almost all of the VMs were Windows 2008 R2 but, there were a couple 2003.

Hardware versions were 7, 8, and 9

Almost all the NICs were VMXNET3 but there were a couple of E1000 on the Server 2003 VMs

A couple of months ago we upgraded about 8 hosts in our test cluster to v5.5.  Since that time, the VMs in test have all rebooted at least twice for patching with no issues.

Any ideas?


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4 Replies
rachelsg
Enthusiast
Enthusiast

Hi

Welcome to communities.

First you need to rollback and check if can restore NIC .

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Earl_Gable
Contributor
Contributor

I have something similar to this happening. I brought my Lab hosts forward to ESXi 5.5 last night. I have been testing out updating VM tools and every time has produced the same results you have been seeing. I have performed the update by choosing Automated in vCenter and I have also told it to install interactively and kicked it off from the OS. No matter which install, upon reboot the VMXNET NIC is missing from network connections and Device Manager shows a missing driver. digging a little further, it appears that the Tools installer has removed the C:\Program Files\Common Files\VMware\Drivers\VMXNET3 folder. It's no wonder it has a driver issue.

My solution has been to uninstall tools and reinstall. Also have had success as you mention, just using the repair option. Both options repopulate the VMXNET3 folder back in its original location. But why is it removed in the first place?

We continue to test to figure this out, will post if we find the cause.

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Gowan08
Contributor
Contributor

Did this ever get resolved or followed up on in another thread? I have a similar situation at a customer site. a vm was rebooted, VMTools natrually updated itself, and the VM powered on with the NIC being presented from VMWare, but the actual device manager lost the device and all that showed was "ethernet controller".

A quick fix to the issue is to uninstall and do a re-scan of devices, then it reinstalls and comes back.

Thanks,

Gowan

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Earl_Gable
Contributor
Contributor

After looking around my environment some more, I found that it appears to be the initial version of ESXi 5.5. Our environment is made up of IBM servers, so I utilized the IBM distro for my ESXi builds which put my hosts at version level 1746974. After messing with the Tools installer for some time and trying different things with it, I dug into Update Manager to see what was available from VMware as far as patches for 5.5. I found that they did have a couple patches available and that some of those were the Tools-Light packages. So, I remediated just one of my hosts and after it finished, I picked a guest on said host and updated tools. I had no issues with the VMXNET3 folder disappearing. The server stayed on the network and all of my IP configuration held. I tried another guest again on the same remediated host and the install was flawless. So, I am thinking whatever the issue was, VMware knew of it and corrected it. The host revision that is installed and seems to have corrected the issue is 1892794.

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