I thought the whole time i knew what I was doing when it came to building templates. I think this is a very important step to NEVER forget if you plan on using Windows Server 2008 R2 or Windows 7 (have not tried this with 2012 or 8 and all documentation does not exist for it yet).
This bug bit me hard this week. I'm planning out multiple SRM testing environments. My goal was to build a single vApp, and clone it a few times. Each clone will keep the same IP addresses and I will only have one environment on at a time to do testing. Of course, this would all be fine within vCD, but I took the old school route.
I have my vCenter/SQL/SRM server all on a single 2008 R2 VM. When I cloned this VM, the IP address didn't stay the same. in fact, a new vmxnet3 adapter was added to the VM and the old one was never found. No big deal, right? I'll go ahead and assign the same IP address to the new adapter. Once I did that I ended up with the dreaded error message "The IP address XXX.XXX.XXX.XXX you have entered for this network adapter is already assigned to another adapter Name of adapter. Name of adapter is hidden from the network and Dial-up Connections folder because it is not physically in the computer or is a legacy adapter that is not working. If the same address is assigned to both adapters and they become active, only one of them will use this address. This may result in incorrect system configuration. Do you want to enter a different IP address for this adapter in the list of IP addresses in the advanced dialog box?" as seen in Microsoft KB 269155.
So this means I have a ghosted adapter. How do I fix this? Well, Scott Lowe had a blog post on this already in his article Problem with VMXNET3 Driver and is also addressed in VMware KB 1020078. There is a Microsoft hotfix available, but IT'S NOT! The only available fix is for Pre SP1!. So I am going to make an update to the VM Advanced ISO to include this hotfix. Thanks to @paulies for hooking me up with the patch via dropbox.
Ok. On to the fix!
1. DO NOT INSTALL THE HOTFIX AS STEP 1! If you install the Hotfix it will make some changes and completely ghost your NIC. Instead, go to your device manager and remove the vmxnet3 adapter. After it's removed, edit the settings on the VM, remove the virtual NIC. Reboot the VM without a new NIC. Install the hotfix and it will need a reboot. Now you can add in a new vmxnet3 adapter and you're golden!
2. So you installed the hotfix first without removing the NIC. Don't worry I did too. So here's what you need to do. Remove the current NIC from device manager and remove it from the virtual hardware like it step 1. Download devcon. Don't try using show_nonpresent_devices in device manager because it doesn't work, just download devcon. I have added this to VM Advanced ISO as well. Or you can download the 32-bit version from Microsoft or the 64-bit version from someone who hacked it here. The 64-bit version is what i used.
3. use the command line console but run it in higher privileges. It must be ran "As Administrator" for removal of ghosted devices to be successfully removed.
4. navigate to the directory where devcon is located and perform the command devcon findall =net
you will see an output that looks like PCI\VEN_10B7&DEV_9200&SUBSYS_00D81028&REV_78\4&19FD8D60&0&58F0: vmxnet3 adapter
5. you will see an output of a few lines and one of them will be a ghosted vmxnet3 adapter. Copy and paste the output to notepad.
6. to remove the ghosted device use devcon remove -r "@THE DEVICE ID". You must add the @ symbol in front of the device so it will look something like this devcon remove -r "@PCI\VEN_10B7&DEV_9200&SUBSYS_00D81028&REV_78\4&19FD8D60&0&58F0"
7. You will then prompted with a successful removal if you are running this as admininistrator
8. Now everything is removed, reboot, install the hotfix, reboot again.
9. Add the new vmxnet3 NIC, and its good. If you keep this NIC with a static IP and clone it, it will keep the same address.