Check database connectivity before restarting. After looking around in the VMware logs the following error was showing up:Īn unrecoverable problem has occurred, stopping the VMware VirtualCenter service. Restarting the service immediately caused it to fall over again. After logging into the Virtual Center server it seems the VMware services had stopped. So in the diagram above Windows would see 6 NIC’s attached but as far as VMware is concerned there is only one NIC installed in the VM.Īfter creating my extra NICs in Windows I went back in to Virtual Center and everything suddenly disappeared! After some ping testing it seems the ESX hosts were still functioning correctly but that the Virtual Center server had crashed. This “virtual-virtual” NIC then functions in windows exactly like it was a separate physical network card with its own protocol settings etc…

You can carry on adding multiple “virtual-virtual” NICs in this way. This then creates a second “fake” adaptor that windows sees as an entirely separate NIC that is only able to communicate on your chosen VLan.

Windows sees the original NIC and then in the driver properties you can specify extra Vlans that the card will function on. Intel provide a windows driver for this chip that lets it use VLan tagging. The network card that appears in windows is using an emulated version of the Intel e1000 chipset. One way around this limitation is to use the Intel e1000 emulation when creating the virtual network cards. In most scenarios this will be more than adequate, however in some situations you want to have more network cards than this, e.g in an ISA server where you want to separate out multiple DMZ networks. In VMware ESX 3 you can have a maximum of 4 NICs per virtual machine.

Luckily the error was fairly easy to reverse and to avoid in future but I think it is worth a post as the error message you receive at first glance looks like a fairly catastrophic error. While deploying a new virtual ISA server this week I came across a rather unfortunate error that caused VMware Virtual Center to crash.

Intel e1000 driver vmware