Whilst doing some work on one of our Windows 2008 R2 templates (AV Upgrade) I discovered that we had an issue with the network being un plugged and not connecting, it turns out that the template had recently been Storage vMotion to a different data store and since then wouldn’t allow the vNIC to connect to the network.
Further checks showed :-
But when I tried to connect the device the following error would appear.
A quick search later brings up a VMware KB article with a couple of fixes but due to this being an environment under strict change control most of the things would have required a CR to be raised for the work to be carried out, only #4 had any real chance of being done but rather than powering down the VM it was easier to just take a note of the IP information (ipconfig /all >nicconf.txt) and removing the existing vNIC from the VM all whilst powered on.
An unfortunate side effect of this however is that you’re now stuck with disabled vNIC’s within the OS, so when you try and populate the new vNIC with the details from the old vNIC you will get an error saying that these settings are already present on a previous vNIC.
To remove the old vNIC from device manager do the following on an admin command line.
set devmgr_show_nonpresent_devices=1
Once you have done that type
devmgmt
This will bring up the device manager console, next you need to show hidden devices.
Now expand the Network adapters tab.
You can see in the picture above that we have two vmxnet3 adapters that are no longer present in the OS, simply delete the NICs (without removing the driver) leaving you with the single present adapter.
