After rebooting virtual machine the guest operating system NIC shows disconnected.
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After rebooting virtual machine the guest operating system NIC shows disconnected.

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Article ID: 411771

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Updated On:

Products

VMware vCenter Server

Issue/Introduction

VMXNET3 network adapter shows disconnected or fails domain authentication after rebooting Windows guest OS

  • After rebooting windows guest OS the NIC card shows disconnected
  • The network adaptor does show up under network setting in guest OS.
  • There was no windows patches applied. 
  • The vNIC adaptor  shows connected under virtual machine setting
  • Under guest OS , Show hidden devices option in the Device Manager (View > Show hidden devices) does not show the virtual NIC or ghosted adapter
    OR
  • Network profile shifts to "Public" for several minutes before (or instead of) authenticating to the domain.
    • Guest OS event logs show LDAP authentication timeouts (e.g., Error 0xA00804C7 or 0x5B4).
    • Also guest os Operational Status flapping (e.g., 5→1→5→1) immediately following boot.

Environment

VMware vSphere ESXi 7.x
VMware vSphere ESXi 8.x

Cause

  • The network connectivity issue was likely caused by a conflict or corruption within the VMXNET3 driver's installation or its interaction with the guest OS's network configuration, possibly corrupted by existing NIC Teaming settings. This underlying inconsistency manifested after the guest OS reboot, preventing the network adapter from correctly initializing.
  • In VMs with low CPU allocation (e.g., 1 vCPU), a race condition can occur where the Windows Network Location Awareness (NLA) service attempts to authenticate before the VMXNET3 driver has stabilized. 

Resolution

To resolve this issue, refer the following steps.

  1. Uninstall VMware Tools from within the guest operating system.
  2. Dissolve any existing NIC Teaming configurations within the guest operating system.
  3. Reboot the guest operating system
  4. Install VMware Tools, ensuring the VMXNET3 driver is properly installed during this process.
    Installing VMware Tools on a VMware vSphere virtual machine running Windows OS
  5. Check the assigned vCPU count. If the VM is configured with 1 vCPU, increase the count to 2 or 4 to alleviate boot-time resource bottlenecks

Additional Information

Networking Error: IP address already assigned to another adapter

 

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