Hello all,

I have several VMs on an ESXi host. My network setup seems to be on the fritz. My motherboard is a Gigabyte GA-MA78GM-US2H with 8GB of RAM and an Athlon X2 5200+. Along the way I have added 2 Intel Pro 1000 GT NICs to mess around with NIC load balancing. That had gone well. I was using the onboard NIC for my management console and the two Intel NICs for VM traffic. Today I was trying to transfer some files off of one of the VMs and the connection kept dropping. The guest VM is Windows Server 2003 R2 x64. I created a simple file share, which I've done successfully in the past, then tried to connect to the share with a physical laptop connected to the local LAN on the same subnet. I can make the connection, but connection keeps becoming inactive.

I took the two Intel NICs out of the pool and had all traffic using the managment NIC (which is the mobo onboard NIC). I tried to get on the internet (www.google.com), but got this error:

Bad Request
Your client has issued a malformed or illegal request.

Any site I go to throws some sort of error. Simply put, I can't surf the web. Clearly there is a bigger problem here. Ironically, I can use the hypervisor from the same laptop without issue.

I'm not a 'nix expert by any means. I can't find any posts about this issue, so I am hoping you all can point me in the right direction. Has my network stack at the host level become corrupt or something?

I am willing to provide screenshots or even do a remote desktop session to resolve this. Any help/advice would be greatly appreciated. I even tried adding my ISP's DNS servers to the network config of the guest VM NIC. Still the same result.

Thanks,
Dave

I should also mentioned that the afformentioned site resolves successfully via a ping:

C:\Documents and Settings\Dave>ping www.google.com

Pinging www.l.google.com [64.233.169.106] with 32 bytes of data:

Reply from 64.233.169.106: bytes=32 time=24ms TTL=241
Reply from 64.233.169.106: bytes=32 time=19ms TTL=241
Reply from 64.233.169.106: bytes=32 time=21ms TTL=241
Reply from 64.233.169.106: bytes=32 time=20ms TTL=241

Ping statistics for 64.233.169.106:
Packets: Sent = 4, Received = 4, Lost = 0 (0% loss),
Approximate round trip times in milli-seconds:
Minimum = 19ms, Maximum = 24ms, Average = 21ms

At the ESXi console you should be able to run wget - try it and see if it can download a file from the web OK. I'd take it your other physical PCs are fine? From a VM can you download a file from the ESXi homepage (i.e. download the vSphere client). Have you cycled the switch?

Hi Dave, and thanks (as always) for the reply. I simply have no idea where to even begin troubleshooting this issue.

From the ESXi console:
~# wget http://google.com
Connecting to google.com[72.14.204.99]:80
index.html 100%|******************| 6515 --:--:-- ETA

So that seemed to work. I was able to go download the infrastructure client from my host homepage, so that's a check. Still can't get on the internet via my Windows VMs. Ironically, I have an Oracle Enterprise Linux VM on there, and I can browse the web on that guest, so I suspect something has been corrupted in my Windows guests. I have no way of telling if this is a Windows thing or an IE thing, as I don't have Firefox on any of the Windows VMs. I'll see if I can devise a way to get it there to further troubleshoot. Thanks for your ideas Dave. I welcome any other feedback or suggestions you might have.

Cheers,
Dave

I'd also check your physical PC to VM communication.

Dave,

Dumb question, but when you say you'd check my physical PC to VM communication, are you suggesting something other than what I've done? I have created a share on the Windows VM and tried to copy files from that share to my physical machine (laptop) on the same local LAN. That transfer has failed, even on 1MB files. Were you referring to something else?

Creating a new Windows server VM as we speak to see if the problem happens in newly created VMs...

Thanks,
Dave

No, I reread things and notice now that you had done that. Given that the Linux VM seems OK it looks like the host networking would be Ok. What sort of virtual NIC are the Windows guests using? Have you tried to change that (i.e. go to flexible or e1000)?

Current adapter = E1000

I don't really know how to change that.

I have a second hard drive in my system, so I installed ESXi 3.5u4 on that, just like the first drive. I created a new VM, and I'm having the same problem. Seems to me that I have one of two issues: a potential hardware issue, or a bad install CD (this seems highly unlikely as it's the same CD I used to do my original install, and that was working fine for the longest time). I still don't get how my Oracle Enterprise Linux machine (which is essentially RHEL) can surf just fine.

Is there anything else I should consider before chalking this up to hardware? I even have my doubts about that assessment because my dad was using this rig a month ago online as a gaming rig with no issue.

How is Windows VM to VM traffic? If you edit the settings for the VM you can add another NIC and then select the adapter type (vmxnet 3), then drop the other NIC.

Or you can unregister the VM, edit the VMX file to update the NIC type and reregister the VM.

Dave,

Again, thanks for your replies and feedback. Didn't realize it, but ESXi supports my mobo out of the box, although not the onboard NIC. So I fired that up today and created a new Windows VM. Low and behold, surfing was fine (I have a couple of Intel Pro/1000 NICs in there as well). I guess there must be something up with the installer I was using. I got the custom 3.5i package from this site (see post "GA-MA78GM-US2H With working r8168 driver") and it worked fine for a while. Not sure what the deal is, and frankly I'm kind of tired of beating on my machine to figure it out.

I'll rock 4.0u1 and hopefully I can transfer the files from my old datastore to the new datastore. Both are internal disks, so I'm going to do some more research on that. I'm hesitant to try and upgrade my 3.5 build due to the issues posted in this very thread. We'll see how it goes.

Thanks again,
Dave