Wake on LAN support

[swsearcy]

ESXi 4 is installed on a system with a dual-port Intel NIC and configured to use vmnic0 for vSwitch0, supporting LAN traffic for the VMs and management traffic for VMkernel. vmnic1 is associated with vSwitch1 and is used exclusively for iSCSI traffic. vSphere Client shows that Wake on Lan is supported for vmnic0 but not vmnic1. I understand that some Intel adapters only support WoL on port A, so this isn't really surprising.

Since all of the guest VMs use vmnic0, which has WoL support, I assumed that the guests would be able to take advantage of WoL support. What I've found however is that while the "Allow this device to bring the computer out of standby" option can be selected in the Power Management tab of the guest network adapter (Intel Pro/1000 MT) properties on WIndows 2003 server, it cannot be set for either Vista or Windows Server 2008 VMs. In the latter two VMs the option is greyed out and the notes for the option indicate that the port doesn't support Wake on Lan.

Is there something in the VM settings that I am missing?

Thanks,

Scott

[Dave_Mishchenko · Accepted solution]

Hi Scott, welcome to the VMware Community forums. What sort of NIC do you have selected for the VMs?

Not all guest operating systems support Wake on LAN. Only the following types of NICs support Wake

on LAN:

n Flexible (VMware Tools required).

n vmxnet

n Enhanced vmxnet

n vmxnet 3

Options are disabled if they are not supported.

[swsearcy]

What was automatically used during the guest OS install - Intel Pro/1000 MT. Thank you, I will investigate how to change that to one of the ones you listed.

Scott

[swsearcy]

Thanks Dave. I found how to change from e1000 to vmxnet3 and the power management option for the nic to bring the computer out of standby is now available.