Vm network card issues

[wolfman350]

I am using VMware and I have a virtual nick that starts loosing connection more and more frequent then fails altogether.  After this failure i have to restart the VM to regain connection. Any ideas or suggestions to try? VMware 5.5

[lowlyf]

What OS is VMware workstation running on? What OS are you virtualizing? Is the virtual NIC connection becoming disconnected from a gateway or something else in the VMware/LAN?

[wolfman350]

VMware is running on CentOS. The OS is CentOS 6 It is sharing the centralized storage to the host OS for distribution for shares. I think this is the care but I will need to get more information, my boss just hit me with this and in my mind if it was a hardware problem i would just replace a nic, but replacing a vmnic not so easy.

 

[leadeater]

If it's not a hardware problem then it is likely a drivers issue or power state configuration settings. The first thing I would do is update the host with the latest VMTools and then upgrade the VMTools package in the guest OS.

 

Also might pay to download the host logs, might be some key error information in there as to whats happening.

[KuJoe]

Which NIC driver is it? vmxnet3? e1000? Replacing the virtual NIC is extremely easy, you basically remove the current one and add a new one then set the IP for it. With CentOS you can even set the new NIC to be eth0 if you want.

 

As a virtual NIC, you should never have disconnections unless you manually disconnect it in the settings. The problem is definitely the guest OS, e1000 has the best compatibility also so I recommend using this if you're having issues with it.