VM NIC Hardware Failure Issue
A few customers have been hit by an intermittent issue where virtual machines seem to reject their network adapters. In Windows, this shows up as the guest OS reporting a hardware failure on the NIC (which, given that the NIC is virtual, is bit of a hard sell). So, while the VM has a network adapter attached to it and it is connected to the network, the VM doesn’t get any network access. If you open up device manager, the “general tab” for the network adapter will show an error (error 10 if memory serves). When you try to update the driver on the NIC, it will fail to install it. I’ve only ever seen this with the vmxnet3 adapter, but I’ve heard that it can affect e1000 as well. Typically, the VM’s network connectivity can be restored by some combination of removing the vNIC from the VM and adding it back (well, it’s technically a new one as it will have a new MAC address), reinstalling the VMTools and/or removing nonpresent NICs from the guest OS. T...