Hi,
ESXi 4.1.0,260247, on Intel S5520HC board with onboard dual Intel 82575EB adapters
Have a few VMs running for a month without issues and somehow one of the VMs stopped talking to the default gateway and the ESXi host. The VM however can still ping the other running VMs. After rebooting the VM a few times the problem went away.
A few days later another VM experienced the same thing. This time rebooted the ESXi host and only one of the four VMs came back alive (can ping gateway and our workstations can ping it). The rest of the VMs after a few reboots came back and on a workstation I have ping -t to keep these VMs alive (works somehow). Just one last VM still cannot ping the ESXi host nor the default gateway. Can still ping its VM peers.
Tried to bring in another VM running from a VMware Server 2 (via converter), also cannot connect to the network outside the host.
Googled for a while and found some posts that talks about arp problems or problem with the host network adapters. I am afraid to reboot the host again as my VMs may not come back online.
I have an Intel PCI NIC (82559) I can possibly install in the host, but I am afraid to turn off the host and cannot get the VMs up after I start the host again.
Additional info
VM 1 (CentOS) - working - 192.168.20.216
VM 2 (W2008) - working - 192.168.20.212
VM 3 (W2003) - working - 192.168.20.207
VM 4 (CentOS) - not working - 192.168.20.149
ESXi host - 192.168.20.218
default gateway - 192.168.20.254
Adapter Details:
Name: vmnic1
Location: PCI 01:00,1
Driver: igb
Networks: 192.168.20.64-192.168.20.127
Please advise,
JC