Some time ago I was asked about a strange behaviour with one of the nearly provisioned virtual machines in vSphere 6.0. When the Network connection setting is changed, the VM was disconnected from the network. An attempt to connect the virtual adapter back led to an error message – ‘Failed to connect virtual device ethernet0’.

Vmware.log for that virtual machine had the following lines:

VMXNET3 user: failed to connect Ethernet0 to vSwitch portgroup XXX.
VigorTransport_ServerSendResponse opID=XXXXXXXX-XX-XXX seq=XXXX: Completed Ethernet request.
Msg_Post: Error
[msg.device.badconnect] Failed to connect virtual device Ethernet0.
—————————————-
Vigor_MessageRevoke: message ‘msg.device.badconnect’ (seq XXXXXXX) is revoked

In vpxd-XX.log I saw this:

[VpxLRO] — ERROR task-XXXXX — vm-XXX — vim.VirtualMachine.reconfigure: vim.fault.GenericVmConfigFault:

Not very informative output.

I opened a support request with VMware. However, we couldn’t reproduce this issue and decided to close the case.

To my surprise, the same problem reappeared early this week; this time I had a better understanding of what was initiating the fault.

The VM had been provisioned from a template with no operating system installed, and the VMware Remote Console 9.0 was used to choose an appropriate port group from the Network Connection drop-down list.

As soon as I set a Distributed Port Group on the menu and power on the VM, the network adapter status was changing to “disconnected.” When I try to re-establish the connection, it showed me an error.

VMware has a few articles that describe similar cases when using vShield App Firewall or mass VM deployment. However, it all was unrelated to my environment.

Fortunately, the VMware community again helps me to find the root cause. It was a VMware Remote Console creating a Standard Port Group with the same name as the Distributed Port Group when adding a network adapter.

A new support request is open with VMware. I hope it won’t be long to have this problem resolved.

05/06/2017 – Update 1: The issue has been resolved in VMware Remote Console 10.0. The only drawback of VMRC is that it doesn’t show to which exact vDS port group the virtual machine is connected.

According to VMware, it is going to be fixed in the future releases of VMRC.