No longer able to remote-desktop to W2K3 VM.

[mhollowaynj]

It seems that somehow networking has stopped working for us in one of our VMs. When I go to edit settings in the Virtual Infra client console and click on Network Adapter 1, I get the following alert:

"The information for device 'Network Adapter 1 is inconsistent with the allowed values. This is most likely the result of manually editing of the configuration file. The device can not be edited in this state. A sysnopsis of the problem will appear in the client log file."

We didn't edit any configs manually, so I guess something got corrupted. When I open a console to the VM from the client, it seems the VM thinks the ethernet has been unplugged. On the main page for the VM in the client, it lists the IP addr as 0.0.0.0.

I would like to know how to recover without too much effort. I've seen a couple answers for other probs suggesting erasure of some lines from the .vmx conf might get things back to manageable, but I don't know what lines I should touch. Appreciate any guidance experts could provide.

Thanks.. Mike.

[Dave_Mishchenko]

You'll want to take a look through the vmware*.log files in the folder for this VM to see if they contain any error. It might also help to post the contents of the vmx file, but basically you'll be looking at the lines that start with ethernet0.

If you just want to quickly get the VM back up

1) create a new VM

2) edit the VM and remove the hard drive.

3) copy over the old VMDK to the new one with vmkfstools -i /source_path/source.vmdk /dest_path/destination.vmdk

4) edit the VM and add an hard drive - use the existing vmdk file that you just created.

5) boot up the VM and set the IP address for the NIC

[patk]

In a worst case scenario you could create a new virtual machine, and assign the disks of the problematic virtual machine to it. This would create a new set of configs that may solve your problem.

[RParker]

this happens to me occassionally, if you edit the config, change the VM Switch to something else, and click ok. Then go back and change the VM switch back to the way you had it. Then try the console to see if you still have a 0.0.0.0 address.

Sometimes a few of my VM's need to reset, the configuration, and it only affects the network, nothing else, it's very odd, but it usually only happens when the vmware server service gets reset...