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ToreUthus
Enthusiast
Enthusiast
‎01-21-2021 06:19 AM

VMwareTools & Win2016 nic problem

Hi all.

I just wonder, does everyone still have problem with Win2016 server and automatic upgrade of VMware Tools during MS Software Updates?

Windows 2016 Server loses its network card after a reboot with autoupdate of tools enabled (71386) (...

Haven't been using the automatic upgrade of Win2016 servers for a long time since this happened to us on a large scale, but decided to try it once more during MS January patches.

Only testet on a small amount of servers (20) but half of it failed.

Does everyone handles VMware Tools "manually" or third party (SCCM, vCenter etc.)?

 

Regards,

Tore

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mdonley
Contributor
Contributor
‎05-18-2021 07:13 AM

Hi Tore

 

Did you find a solution to this? We're seeing it in our estate.  Approximately 15% of VMs end up with no networking and removed VMware Tools after auto-upgrade that occurs at the same time as a Microsoft Update operation.  We've only seen this with VMware Tools 11.2 and later.

We think it's related to the dependency on newer Visual C++ runtimes which would get installed by the VMware Tools installer.  These need a reboot, after which VMware Tools is upgrade, expect sometimes Tools is removed, but not reinstalled.

As yet, we've not found a common cause, so we're thinking some sort of race condition, but I can't reproduce the problem on demand.  We had a case open with GSS, but they basically said 'upgrade tools manually', which I disagree with as we've always auto-upgraded VMware Tools (for years) without issue.

Thanks

Mike

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