I've been unable to find details about what occurs to the guest vmnics upon recovery and would appreciate some clarification and / or guidance. We are running ESX 6.5 with vSphere Replication 6.5.x.x replicating multiple VMs to a DR site. We will be testing the failover / failback on test VMs next week but have not yet done so. I am working on scripting the IP change as we will need to change all replicated VM IPs for the DR site subnet and initiate registration with DNS as well as force arp cache clear on PCs. I expect that the vmNics get new MAC addresses which will cause Windows 2012 R2 (well any version of Windows) to default the configuration leaving behind the missing NICs hardware / software settings.
My questions are:
1) Does this happen or if not what exactly does transpire in regard to vmNic configuration?
2) If only IP is reset does VM retain the hardware settings the existing vmNic was configured for? This is especially important for us in regard to RDS on 2012 using VMXNET3 vmNics.
We run an EHR that is written rather inefficiently for SQL server (no connection pooling or reuse) that requires us to modify the default hardware config or suffer significant performance degradation. In event of failover this will need to be scripted if the settings do not apply to the NIC that that VM boots with.
3) Do the above answers apply to failback? I assume yes but then again I would expect in failback for the VM to retain is previous MAC and Windows should have the settings in the registry but..
Of course as said we will test this next week but any prior knowledge would be a boon.
Thank you,
badgenes
