vmware tools automatic update failure during windows patches

[Erik_Horn]

This morning we had no network connectivity in several Windows VMs after installing windows patches last night. We have vmware tools set to automatically update and due to recent host patches, it was out of date. The upgrader successfully uninstalled vmware tools, but failed installing the new package leaving the system with no vmxnet3 driver.

We've had automatic vmware tools updating enabled for a long time with no issues. We are wondering if anybody else has seen this issue?

We did manually replicate the problems following these steps:

Log into server

Run windows updates

Reboot when prompted

When the system came back up, there was no network.

To bring the system back online, we had to manually install vmware tools, and reconfigure the network interface in windows.

To prevent further outages, we will be disabling automatic vmwares tools update until we find a solution.

Other bits of information:

We recently updated the virtual hosts from 6.5U1 to 6.5U2 which caused vmware tools to be out of date.

The windows update being installed was the October 2018 cumulative update.

Windows 2012R2 and 2016 are both affected.

The old version of vmware tools is version 10287.

The new version of vmware tools is version 10305.

The installer log (attached) shows that vmware tools failed due to error 1603

Not all of our systems were affected. Some installed without problems.

[dbalcaraz]

So, what is the issue here?

That the VMtools were corrupted and you had to re-install it?

The error 1603 it's a very common error: VMware Knowledge Base

You should check the Event Viewer from the server and see which is the problem.

Another thing is, I would suggest you not to Automatically Update VMware Tools without any parameter...

Usually you should have a wide window to update the servers and then check if the first one is affected about it.

Hope this helps.

[Erik_Horn]

The problem is that we had a few production servers with no network connectivity due to a failed vmtools install.

Thanks,

Erik

[dbalcaraz]

Hi,

Yes, I saw it but what do you want to solve know?

If it didn't work, it's just a matter of how do you upgrade your environment.

Please check the Event Viewer on the Win Servers but there is nothing we can do on the VMware side as it's affecting the Guest OS.