VMware Horizon Community
jeffcc
Contributor
Contributor

Some View VMs not getting DHCP unless Re-add NIC

We have a client with about 70 VMs. We're using View 5.1. Last week, they had a bad electrical storm that did some damage to other parts of the network. At some point during the storm, they lost power, power was down overnight, backup batteries eventually ran out, and some of our VM servers didn't shut down gracefully (i.e., they crashed).

Ever since we got them back up, we've been having some strange issues with the VMs and their virtual NICs. Every now and then (roughly a couple times an hour at random), the View Console will suddenly show about half of the VMs as "Agent Unreachable." After a few minutes, they'll all be back to normal. We rebuilt a couple of the pools last night to see if that would resolve anything, but during the rebuild, a couple of the machines showed "Error" and a handful showed "Agent Unreachable" again. We discovered that to resolve this, we had to manually log into each of the affected machines and each "Disable" and "Enable" the virtual NICs (these are WinXP SP3 VMs) or remove the NIC from the VM and re-add it. Removing and re-adding has the effect of then getting a completely new lease since the re-added NIC has a different MAC address, which isn't cool.

I was thinking we'd re-install the Connection server, Composer and vCenter tonight and maybe rebuild all the pools with a fresh snapshot, so I was updating the master template we use for all the VMs (they're linked clones). But I noticed whenever I reboot the master image, it comes up with a self-assigned IP address, and I have to either disable/enable or remove/re-add the NIC.

It may be that there's something else going on on the network, but DHCP is working for all the other physical workstations (about 100 of them), and it's only the virtuals that are having the issue.

I've tried rebooting everything (vCenter server, Connection server, will try rebooting DC tonight). I've also tried giving a static IP to the VMs when they're having the trouble, but they can't ping anywhere except their own address.

Any ideas? We're basically at the point where we start reinstalling everything, which isn't the most elegant solution.

Thanks.

5 Replies
julienvarela
Commander
Commander

Hi,

Welcome to the community, and i would like to know if your VMs got an IP address or not ? because it is not clear. Then , do you have some event on your DHCP server ? maybe try to simply restart your DHCP? and delete all your old reservations. Because if it is working with a new nic (as you say , a new mac address is generated) i think you need to delete all your reservations address on your DHCP scope (for your VMs) and restart your DHCP.

Regards,

Julien

Regards, J.Varela http://vthink.fr
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jeffcc
Contributor
Contributor

No, the problem VMs do not get DHCP leases.

It's not just a matter of clearing out the old DHCP leases and restarting (both of which I've done multiple times) since the NICs don't even work if I assign static IPs to them.

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julienvarela
Commander
Commander

Ok thank you for the clarifications. And when you assign a static IP are you able to ping two VMs located on the same vswitch for example?

Do you have some output to attach like screenshot and log on your event viewer?

Regards,

Julien.

Regards, J.Varela http://vthink.fr
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Schenkewitz
Contributor
Contributor

Hi,

we had some similar problems with our Windows 7 and Windows 8 Linked-Clones. We resolved this issue by removing the NICs from our Base VM and adding a new one to it.
(We also uninstalled the NICs in the OS before adding a new one / if you'r using vShield Endpoint you also should delete the security informations for all NICs in VMs .vmx file).

And in the end we rebuilded our Desktop Pools and all VMs are getting their DHCP Lease and can reach the Network / Internet.

Regards from Germany,

Christian

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adacsaba
Contributor
Contributor

i second this issue on VMware Workstation 7.1.3 build-324285, on Windows 7 x86 Ultimate host

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