Secondary vmxnet3 adapter stays in Public Network

[vissersmatthias]

Hi,

I am having an issue with a windows 7 machine on a VMWare environment.
There are several adapters linked to the virtual machine and 2 of them have to be on the domain network.

The Primary adapter connects and stays connected to the Domain network without any problems; however when I enter the static ip, default gateway for the secondary adapter and the DNS settings, windows doesn't recognize the adapter as part of the domain network. (sets to Public network)

I have tried disabling and enabling, removing the adapter on VMware and readding it. turned of windows Firewall and so on.

From another PC I can ping both the primary and the secondary IP.
Remote desktop only works on the primary IP.

Some more details:

primary ip 172.16.x.x
default gateway 172.16.x.x
DNS 172.16.x.11 and 172.16.x.12

secondary ip 172.17.x.x
default gateway 172.17.x.x
DNS same as primary

I am kinda at the end of ideas, so all suggestions welcome.

Kind regards.

 

[camieabz]

Have you applied the 255.255.0.0 subnet mask to (all) these network IPs?

 

[vissersmatthias]

Have you applied the 255.255.0.0 subnet mask to (all) these network IPs?

The subnet mask is 255.255.252.0 on all.

 

[vissersmatthias]

Update:

We tried some additional solutions, with advanced settings to setup the priority's, deleted changes of the adapter from regedit and retried. added suffix, used VWMare Tools "repair" option, and so on.

We have 2 of these windows 7 virtual machines that had the same problem.
Now the first one we fixed by going to "network ID" and reattaching it to the domain there. (from windows computer settings)
And after reboot it worked somehow.

But when we tried to do the same with the second virtual machine it failed...
Everything seems the same on both machines.

 

[camieabz]

I dare-say you've tried some or all of this, but suggest you start here - https://kb.vmware.com/s/article/2019836 (VMware version unimportant, so much as the possible reasons for lack of connectivity).

Another idea as to the cause (2018) - https://social.technet.microsoft.com/Forums/en-US/ae0d91d5-6c82-4cc5-b60a-8bdfa0bddbad/march-2018-windows-update-removes-virtual-network-adapter-creates-new-default-one?forum=winserversecurity

And one suggested solution (from 2016) - https://blogs.vmware.com/apps/2016/06/rush-post-microsoft-convenience-update-and-vmware-vmxnet3-incompatibilities.html

It might be that one or more of the Windows updates is causing a driver / Nic reset.

It's not just the vNIC that is affected.

From a conversation I just had with VMware, it apparently resets the PCI bus which winds up re-enumerating some of the virtual adapters. Some of the devices come up fine, others don't

A couple of the systems I have, have multiple drives on multiple luns running paravirtualization interface got re-hashed as well as the NICs. As such the MS SAN policy wouldn't let the drive come on automatically, had to go in and 'Online' the specific volumes in question and then rebooted to assure it stayed up. I will need to go in and disable that specific policy during my next maintenance window so if the volumes get re-hashed again I don't have to worry about them coming online properly.

Hope you thrash it out.