Network connection issues in VMWare ESXi 3.5

[chrisbdaemon]

I'm running VMWare ESXi off a USB stick on a Dell Poweredge 850 server. I primarily use OpenBSD 4.5 virtual servers and typically they work just fine. I do however have one virtual server running OpenBSD 4.5 that has its internet connection drop every few days for no apparent reason.

To fix it, I have to load Windows XP in VMWare Fusion and connect to the management interface with VMWare Infrastructure client, login to the server thats having problems and ping a host, any host and it brings it back up. Its almost like it doesn't detect traffic so it turns off the connection or something for some reason and comes back up when outbound connection is detected. Its a very light load and doesn't go over 1Mb/s throughput and there are times when its not used at all. Its only happening with one of the virtual servers and its only been happening the past month or two when it had been running fine for several months before that.

Does anyone have any ideas what might be causing this and how I can fix it?

[DSTAVERT]

ESXi version? OpenBSD logs tell you anything? vmware logs for the VM (in the same directory as the vmdk) tell you anything? Anything different about this VM. What changed about the time that the problem started? What nic do you use? Have you tried installing the freebsd tools?

[chrisbdaemon]

VMWare ESX Server 3i Version 3.5.0 Build 110271. Nothing telling in the OpenBSD syslog. VMWare logs are the only interesting thing I have found so far. Every couple days theres several screenfuls of messages "vcpu-0| serial0: Overrun" and "vcpu-0| serial1: Overrun", about 15 times every 1 hundredth of a second followed by a "mks| SOCKET 2 client closed connection" with the 2 incrementing every time the message occurs. The entry I'm looking at shows the SOCKET closed connection message about 40 seconds after the last Overrun message. However, other times its a day or so after and theres also times where I get the "mks| SOCKET # client closed connection" message several times without any other messages in between.

Nothing is really different about this VM and its been happening for so long I don't recall if I had changed anything or not, its been several months that I've been putting up with this. NIC is the standard builtin NIC in the Dell Poweredge 850, NetXtreme BCM5721 Gigabit Ethernet but I have other VM's using that same physical NIC and they don't have any problems. I haven't installed the FreeBSD tools yet partly because I didn't think I needed to. I wanted to leave as small of a footprint from VMWare on the servers as I could just to be safe.