I had a weird issue today where all of my 2022 servers lost their static IP in my home lab. it impacted 8 server 2022 machines. Linux guests were not impacted.
Some backstory
Vsphere 8 with the latest esxi 8.0b on 2 hosts. The issue spanned both hosts. I recently redid my shared storage yesterday so I had briefly moved all vms to host 2 so that I could redo the shared storage (host 1 only has access to the shared datastore). When this was complete I moved all vms back to their normal location. Half on host 1 half on host2.
Everything worked fine. I should mention that vmware tools is the latest as well.
Today I logged in to 2 machines via RDP and they both had a system tray icon stating a reboot was required to finalize the paravirtual driver. I found that odd since I had not updated vmware tools or ran any windows updates recently but I kinda shrugged it off.
i started noticing DNS resolution was failing and when I checked my dcs I noted that had pulled DHCP rather than having their static IP. Upon further investigation I found this was impacting every single server 2022 box. All my windows vms are 2022 except I have 1 windows 11 box, the windows 11 machine was not impacted nor was linux.
The cause is the vmxnet3 adapter was recognized as a new #2 adapter suddenly, while the original was listed under device manager as a hidden device. I've only seen this when changing the network card type in vmware (edit settings) or of course adding a new nic. I am still unclear as to why this happened, why it impacted all servers and spanned both hosts.
I found this very odd, the timing is also odd. Windows updates last ran 2/16. I have rebooted the machines since then and also several times in the past few days. I have rebooted them since fixing all of this and the fix has remained.
