Flexible NIC?

[reyno002]

We are in the process of evaluating the vCloud Director as the management layer for a corporate IT lab. I have been trying to create a completely new vm in a vApp in vCD. I am using Windows 7 and direct-connected VLAN with an external dhcp server, so the setup is 1 nic, the direct-connect name and dhcp. This setup will automatically select the flexible nic as the nic type. It never works. In fact, there is actually no nic that the system will recognize, either before or after installing VMware Tools. If I go into VC and select a specific nic, the Director will simply blank out all the particulars for the reconfigured nic and revert it back to the flexible nic. I understand why it might do this, but it never works. It doesn't matter if I use dhcp or a pooled address, no dice on the networking, there is simply no nic in the system. The port group in the distributed switch works just fine in an externally created Win7 vm. So what am I not seeing? Thanks.

Rick Reynolds

US Census Bureau

[reyno002]

I have noticed (by accident because it's not actually visible) in the setup screen for a new vm that, while you might select Windows 7 32-bit as your vm os, when you go through the configuration process, the os toggles to "Windows Server 2003". I'm betting this screws up the whole customization process which messes up the networking, resulting in no nic at all. This happens every time with Win 7 32-bit. 64-bit Win 7 works fine as did the other os I tried, CentOS 5.5. So I don't think there's any way I can fix this.

Rick Reynolds

US Census Bureau

[sjoglekar]

I can suggest a work-around for this issue. You can try to create the VM in VCenter, install vmware tools and import it in vCloud - this should work.

Hope that helps!

[admin]

I believe you've hit two issues here:

1. When you create a new VM, the default guest OS selected shows Windows 7 32-bit, however, it toggles to Windows 2003 when you add it to the vApp. The workaround is to select a different OS, and then re-select Windows 7 32-bit.

2. vCloud incorrectly sets the NIC of Windows 7 32-bit to 'Flexible', whereas it should be set to 'E1000'. This also applies to both when you create a new Windows 7 32-bit VM, or when you add a NIC to an existing one. In addition to the workaround in the previous comment, you can use http://kb.vmware.com/kb/1003020 to manually update the adapter to E1000 directly in the VMX file.

If you need further help, please contact VMware Support.