VM NIC Status-ESXi 5

[gaddevamsi84]

Hi,

I've had a situation where by configuring all the VMs to have their VM tools upgraded on power cycle. Our environment have 4 NICs (VMXNet3) for each VM (2 Live & 2 disabled for DR situation). coincidentally we had a windows patching done & after the reboot of all VMs, those disabled NICs have been enabled automatically thus causing a considerable amount of DNS resolve conflicts.

This has never happened before on any occasion of Windows patching until this new configuration of all the VMs have been changed (upgrade VM tools on power cycle). Please somebody advise me if this is by nature or design ? Thanks in advance.

[arathore]

See if you can roll back the changes

[arathore]

also see if this helps:

VMware KB: Virtual NIC settings on a Windows guest are lost after a virtual hardware upgrade

Please mark a like if this helps

[gaddevamsi84]

My question is if all the VMs have had their VM tools upgraded, is it likely to cause those 2 disabled NICs to reset their status & get enabled ? Because when I checked the driver's details of those VMXNet3 NICs, the time stamp of Last Accessed matches the reboot time of the VM.

[arathore]

that could possibly be  the case, in scenario where the VMupgrade helper tool does not fetch the info stored in registry prior to update

OR

in your case, since this is an auto upgrade, changes like this have been seen in past

[gaddevamsi84]

Hi ARathore,

Any workaround for this, because I had to manually disable those 2 NICs (designed for DR) on 100+ VMs. We do the Windows patching on monthly basis. If this were to be repeated on the next occasion, that doesn't look good for the client. (Unless our patching team should double check the NICs status after the VMs reboot).

[arathore]

First thing first: run a script to disable the option of auto upgrade, this shall not let the vmtools auto upgrade while reboot  and shall be good to achieve your output, ill see if I can find a script for disabling the auto upgrade of vm tools

[arathore]

Try this KB

VMware KB: Setting all virtual machines to automatically upgrade VMware Tools at next power-on

let me if this resolves your issue

[gaddevamsi84]

@arathore,

I've got no problem centrally managing this feature for all the VMs via GUI. But the issue here is with the disabled NICs being automatically enabled by themselves after VM tools upgrade.

So to avoid the above I need to turn off this auto upgrade feature & manually upgrade VM tools.

[arathore]

Thats what I said