Network adapter disappears from a Windows virtual machine

[vmproteau]

Someone on my team came across this issue on a couple VMs.

Pulled from KB 1020718

ESX 4.x introduced a new feature called HotPlug. In some deployments virtual NICs can appear as removable devices on the System Tray in Windows guest operating systems. Problems can occur if you mistake this device for one that you can safely remove. This is particularly true in VMware View environments, where interaction with the Desktop is constant. Do not remove virtual NICs from the Windows System Tray.

There is a request to make changes identified in the KB resolution to our Windows templates. I've never seen this before and hesitate to make any changes to base templates. Does anyone know what specific deployment scenerio causes this system tray anamoly?

[peetz · Accepted solution]

Hi,

the HotPlug feature is not an anomaly and it does not only occur with specific deployment scenarios. It introduces the capability to hot-add and hot-remove certain harware devices (like NICs) to and from a VM (if the guest OS also supports it) regardless of how it was deployed.

An often unwanted side effect is that a user accidently unplugs the VM's NIC by using the "Safely Remove Hardware ..." tray icon.

You can prevent this by setting the VM advanced configuration option that is explained in http://kb.vmware.com/kb/1012225.

Making this change to a VM template will result in all VMs that are deployed from this template to have HotPlug disabled.

It doesn't have any negative side effects, so I consider this a safe measure and would even recommend it.

Hope this helps ...

- Andreas

[vmproteau]

Thanks for the reply. This is the first instance of a user doing this so, I think it is more of a user education issue. If that isn't sufficient, I may opt for a group policy or registry change to remove/hide this from the system tray as opposed to blanket disabling Hot Plug in general. Thanks for the comments.