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bak015
Contributor
Contributor

VMs losing network connection after tools upgrade

I've updated tools on two servers after installing the latest patches on my ESXi 5.5 hosts, and both times the VMs have lost their VMXNet3 NICs.  When I look in c:\program files\common files\vmware\drivers, the vmxnet3 folder isn't there.  I've been adding an E1000 NIC, copying the folder over, then updating the driver on the VMXNet3 which gets Windows to recognize it and everything's happy, but I can't do that on every server(not least because there would be a lot of screaming involved if all these servers started dropping off the network unexpectedly).

Has anyone run into this sort of thing before?

Thanks

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4 Replies
amurrey
Enthusiast
Enthusiast

Does re installing VMWare Tools fix it?

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bak015
Contributor
Contributor

Yes, uninstalling and then re-installing the tools after the upgrade does fix the problem. 

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computerguy7
Enthusiast
Enthusiast

does this happen every time or only on some VMs? What is the exact vmware tools version you are installing?

I've had some weird issues recently where my VM's will stop responding to network communication until I disable and re-enable the vNIC inside the guest OS.

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bak015
Contributor
Contributor

Well, I haven't done it on all my VMs yet, but of the ones I've done, 100% have lost their NIC drivers.  I've tried uninstalling the NIC and reinstalling it, removing it in VCenter and adding a new one, etc.  Nothing works until I actually copy the vmxnet3 drivers back onto the server.  It's only started happening in the past couple of weeks, since we updated the ESXi servers to 5.5.0 version 1623387.  The version of the tools I'm installing is 9.4.0, build 1280544, upgrading from 9.0.10, build 1481436.

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