Upgrade from ESXi 5.0 to 5.1 - all Redhat Linux VMs lose networking

[budbeacham]

Yesterday, I upgraded ESXi 5.0 to 5.1 on my server.  This server has 12 Redhat 6.2 and 6.3 64 bit server VM guests, and 1 VMassistant (VMA) guest.  They have been working fine for a year.  There are two eth ports; eth0 and eth1.  eth0 uses DHCP to get an IP on the lab net.  eth1 has a static IP. 

After the upgrade, neither eth port exists, and networking is inop on all 12 VMs.  The VMA guest sort of works, but is broken.  It gets a DHCP address, it can be pinged by a machine on the lab net, but cannot be accessed outside the lab.

For the upgrade I removed the VMs from inventory, chose the first option to upgrade and keep the datastore.  The upgrade appeared to go fine.  I added the VMs back into inventory, and the Vsphere Client sees all devices.  However, as I mentioned, networking is broken

'ifconfig' output shows only the 'lo' port

'ip a' output shows 'lo', and an 'eth3' instead of 'eth0', and 'eth2' instead of 'eth1'.  These bogus eth ports have no configuration.

How do I get my networking back?  At this point, the only solution appears to delete all guests, and reinstall each one.

Thank you.

[budbeacham]

This is a bit more information.  After doing 'service network start' I see this message.

Device eth0 does not seem to be present, delaying initialization.

Same message for eth1

Why aren't these eth ports being recognized after doing an upgrade to ESXi 5.1?

[marcelo_soares]

When you readded the VMs and powered them back on, did the client asked about keeping or changing the UUID (asking if you "moved" or "copied" the VM)? If yes, what did you answered?

[SatyS]

Feels that you have done a copy operation when the client has asked for.

If you have opted for copy option, VMWare apply a new MAC Address to your network interfaces but they don’t update the linux configuration files to mirror these changes and so the kernel can’t find or start the interface that matches it’s configuration (with the old MAC Address) and it finds a new interface (the new MAC Address) that  has no configuration information.So try these for fixing it.

-Remove the kernel’s networking interface rules file so that it can be regenerated

# rm -f /etc/udev/rules.d/70-persistent-net.rules

-Restart the VM

# reboot

-UPDATE your interface configuration file

# vim /etc/sysconfig/networking/devices/ifcfg-eth0

-Remove the MACADDR entry or update it to the new MACADDR for the interface (listed in this file: /etc/udev/rules.d/70-persistent-net.rules).

-Remove the UUID entry

-Save and exit the file

-Restart the networking service

# service network restart

Regards,

SatyS

If you find this useful,mark the answer as correct/helpful

[SatyS]

Are you still facing the issue?

-SatyS