View 4 - VM Losing Nic out of the blue

[Gwi]

Hi Everyone !

We have recently upgraded our View 3 infrastructure to View 4 (ESX/VDM/VCenter). Everything went really well!

I have upgraded the Hardware of my template to version 7, my Vmware tools are up to date and the View Agent is at version 4.

For some weird reason, one of the user lost contact of his VM this morning. We had access to it in the vsphere client and we acknowledge that the VM no longer had a network adapter. After adding a new one, everything worked fine.

We did a quick look at our VM pool and discover that we had 2 others VM that lacked a NIC.

Here is my question :

What did we do wrong, for the VM to loose their NIC like that, just for fun ? Is there a new way (in View 4) to give a NIC to a VM so that it stays ?

Thanks !

- Guillaum Beaulieu

[gunnarb]

How are your VMs setup? Linked Clones? Or did you manually upgrade the Hardware/Tools on each VM? I would assume the Hardware change knocked out the original NIC and they were replaced with the new NIC, after installing the new Tools that should have resovled the issue. If you are doing linked clones I'd also do the "Show Hidden Devices" trick in the VM and make sure to remove the residual NIC drivers left over from the old hardware. Just put this in a command line and delete the old NIC.

set devmgr_show_nonpresent_devices=1

start devmgmt.msc

If you are running linked clones, I believe you have to redeploy the clones, else you can just do it on a per VM basis.

So the short answer is I think you may jsut have some hardware issues after the upgrade (I've had it happen to me with servers. Hopefully just cleaning it up after the upgrade will help.

[Gwi]

The way we are working to generate VM is :

Edit a VM, upgrade Vmware tools, etc. Then transform it into a Template.

After that, I give the template to the View Manager so that it create VM out of it.

Is that linked clones ?

The VM that I'm having trouble with are New VM(From new Template) that had been use for 3 days. The user where using the VM, and today, those VM don't have a nic anymore..

Message was edited by: Gwi

[gunnarb]

I don't have a full picture of what you are doing but this is what I'm hearing from you:

• You had an old (Version 3) template that you have converted to a new template with new tools/hardware.

• All VMs that you have built using the new template have a NIC issue.

If this is the case, I'd go back to the original template and create a stand alone VM from it. I'd upgrade the hardware then the tools then boot that machine up. With the machien booted I'd clean up the NIC settings (as I showed you in my first post). Once those settings are clean and you have verified that the VM works as it should, I'd shut down the VM and convert it to a template (I might reboot it once more before converting it just to be on the safe side). I would then attempt to build VMs off of this template.

Gunnar

[Gwi]

That is what's strange.

It's not all my VM that are having the NIC problem. Only 3 VM out of 160 VM (For now).

I'm trying to find the source of the problem before it happens again !

[nonsparker]

We are having the same issue after upgrading to ESX 4 U1 and View 4. We have a template that View makes a full clone of for a new VM. I would like to know if you guys found any reasons for this.

[Gwi]

Nothing yet !

We are still looking for an answer.

We just keep looking each morning on the Vcenter Map to see if there is any VM that have missing NIC.

[nonsparker · Accepted solution]

I was reading this post http://communities.vmware.com/message/1471737 and figured this might be the issue. I tested it and the NIC disappears and does not come back. do you think it is the users? Most of mine come from labs. I'm in a k-12 school and I would not put it past the students to remove the nic just for fun.

What do you guys think?

[fechegaray]

I had a configuration variable named

ethernet0.allowGuestConnectionControl="TRUE"

on the VM (this was added unknowingly to me, but not in all the VMs), and the variable exists on 3.x and other VMW products as well.

This allows control of the connection from inside the guests that have VMware tools installed (I *think* it also has something to do with the vmdk being non-persistent)

You can "Edit settings -> Options tab ->General -> Configuration Parameters...", then select

ethernet0.allowGuestConnectionControl and change its value to FALSE

Also make sure your template

does not have this value or that it is set to FALSE as well.

[fechegaray]

You may want to review KB 1012225...

Fermin Echegaray

Applications Engineer, Worldwide Field Ops.

Pano Logic, Inc.

1350 Willow Road Ste 202 • Menlo Park, CA 94025

[Gwi]

I've just experienced something with a user:

She was trying to map an usb stick into her VM (using the big button on the top) and off course being a user, she failed to do it ...

So I came to help her and I found out that the usb stick was already open in the host ( I minimize the VM, close the open USB stick folder).

That is when everything went wrong.

We lost access to the VM, we did try to reconnect but it failed. I went to see the VM via the VI client and the VM had no longer a NIC...

[Gwi]

It's confirmed with two other users. It has something to do with connecting an USB Stick into the VM...

[Gwi]

I found it...

It was the user that disconnected the NIC.

It appeared that they have the option to safely remove device called vmxnet3 Ethernet adapter. The first thing that they do is remove that device, obliviously... they don't read.

I found that fix. I do worked.

http://www.vmwareinfo.com/2009/11/vsphere-disable-device-hot-plug-on.html