Problem:
- Windows 2008 R2 or Windows 2012 servers have no network access after a reboot
- Not all VMs affected, but multiple VMs and mulitiple hosts.
- Windows Network configuration shows the correct info
- Ipconfig shows a 169.254.x.x IP address
- Disabling and re-enabling the guest NIC fixes the issue. Also, a VM disconnect/connect fixes the issue.
Things I have tried:
- Switch vNIC from E1000 and E1000e to VMXNET3 (per VMware support). This appeared to work for a while, but the problem continues.
- Updated VMware tools (appeared to help at first)
- Updated hypervisor (appeared to help at first)
- Today I opened a new VMware support ticket
A similar question on serverFault proposed a solution of turing off power management in device manager. I will see if this helps, but I doubt this will help. I do not think the OS is trying to save power during the bootup process.