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rurounijones
Contributor
Contributor

vmxnet3 ip not being set

Hello all.

I am trying to get deploy Windows 2008 R2 VMs from a Template       using vCenter 5.0

The template uses the vmxnet3 NIC which has been set to       automatically obtain an IP and DNS server.

I have applied the hotfix which stops the NIC being renamed to       #2: kb.vmware.com/kb/1020078

I have a customisation specification setup which uses custom       network settings.

I have set the settings to be "Prompt the user for an address       when the specification is used" and have filled in the Subnet       Mask, Default Gateway and DNS server IPs.

Now when I deploy a VM from this template I am prompted to enter       the IP address. So far so good.

However after windows has sysprepped and started the windows IPv4       settings are:

IP Address is set to Automatic:

Default Gateway is set to the value specified in the       customisation specification.

DNS server is also set to the value specified in the       customisation specification.

So basically it appears that the NIC is not being set to static       and the static IP  is not being applied.

This also happens if I change the customisation specification to       not prompt the user but just set a static IP directly.
I have also tried setting the NIC to static with an IP in the template  itself but no joy, everytime a VM is created from the template the DNS  and gateway info works but the IP is set to Automatic and the IP /  Subnet is blank and greyed out.

This problem is not occuring with a template using the e1000 NIC.

To create this template I mainly followed the suggestions here:
http://www.jasonsamuel.com/2010/05/07/how-to-build-a-vmware-vsphere-vm-template-for-windows-server-2...

Although I run sysprep once to get everything copied to the default  user and reboot fully and done a few more things. I then shutdown the VM  (without running sysprep again) and convert it to a template, ready to  deploy VMs from.

Has anyone else had a similar problem and managed to solve it?

Looking at the windows device manager (including hidden) I only see one vmxnet3 ethernet adapter so I do not believe the problem lies with "ghosted" adapters

Cheers

Jeff

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rurounijones
Contributor
Contributor

After more experimenting I determined that this problem is caused by the following:

Our network uses static IP Addresses therefore we disabled the "DCHP Client" windows service believing that we had no use for it.

However for some reason disabling this service causes the VMWare IP customisation to fail.

To avoid this problem, do not  disable "DCHP Client" in your template even if you are using static addressing.

[EDIT] My previous post erroneously said that this only affected the vmxnet3 adapter. This is incorrect. The E1000 adapter (and I imagine all others) is also affected.

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