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msteele999
Contributor
Contributor

VM's stop pinging - Win2K3 servers - ESXi 4.0

Hello all,

I have been experiencing the following issue for about a week now:

I have a VM (windows server 2003 standard) running. It stops pinging from my workstation and from my network monitoring platform (which is on the VM Server). Once this happens, the VM cannot ping the default gateway. Eventually the alarm clears on my netmon, however I still cannot ping the server from my workstation AND I cannot ping the default gateway from the server - although the server can ping everything else on the network. The only way I have been able to fix the problem is to change the IP address of the server.

This has occured on two different VM's to date.

I am running ESXi 4.0 on two Dell R610 servers.

Any assistance will be gratefully received.

Mark

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4 Replies
msteele999
Contributor
Contributor

Quick update - after approximately 10 minutes, the server does start to ping again and can ping the default GW from inside the VM.

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Scissor
Virtuoso
Virtuoso

Perhaps a MAC address conflict? Is your problem VM a copy of another VM? If so, double-check to make sure it has a different ethernet MAC address.

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msteele999
Contributor
Contributor

Scissor,

Thank you for the reply. I just checked all the MAC addresses - they are all unique.

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J1mbo
Virtuoso
Virtuoso

It does sound like a MAC issue - especially as the Windows ARP cache timeout is also 10 minutes.

Use "arp -a" to find out what MAC address it's using for the default gateway when it's working normally and in failure mode.

HTH

Please award points to any useful answer.

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