Guest will occasionally start up with network disconnected

[Druber]

So, I have 2 6.7 hosts in an HA configuration. 15 or so running guests. Working fine. Night before last, we had a major thunderstorm and lost power for 2 hours or so. When UPS ran down, both esxi hosts powered off. When power came back, they booted up and all the guests started fine. Except for one CentOS 7 guest. It was not accessible on the network. After logging in to Vcenter, and looking at that guest, I saw that the nic on the guest was attached to the VM Network as expected, but was showing as 'Not connected'. Edit the settings, click the checkbox for the connected state, and save, and boom, it was visible and all was well. This is not the first time I have seen this happen. I googled around, but didn't see anything related to this (the only similar post somewhere referred to an issue with Windows Server 2012R2 - not helpful. Any ideas would be much appreciated.

[peetz]

Greetings,

you need to provide more information ... Questions:

1. "This is not the first time I have seen this happen": At what other occasions did this happen before? Always after unexpected outages, or also after regular VM power cycles? Was it always the same VM having that issue, or also others?

2. Check the VM's event log in vCenter: Any related error message there?

3. Check the VM's log file in the VM's home directory: Any related error message there?

- Andreas

[Druber · Accepted solution]

Well, that was annoying.  I happened to be checking the vmx file and saw that startConnected was FALSE.  Looked at the settings in vcenter, and saw that I had checked the 'connected' box, but didn't notice the 'connect at power on' box was unchecked.  I think this happened because I recently migrated an old mailserver  config to a new VM.  I initially had it offline so it wouldn't clash with the old one.  Once it was all migrated, I 'fixed' this by checking the connected box, thus leaving the mine to step on later.  Sorry for the wasted bandwidth, and thanks for the questions.