Thursday 22 February 2018

Aide Memoire - Windows Server 2012 and the Missing Network

Not 100% sure why this occurred, but I had an issue today whereby a VM, hosted on my Mac using VMware Fusion 10.1.1, seemingly lost it's mind or, to be more accurate, it's network connection.

The VM is Windows Server 2012, and it's been running happily for some weeks, since first I built it last month.

Even more weirdly, it was working today, until lunchtime - perhaps that's what changed ?

Anyway, the symptom was that, suddenly, the client that was attempted to connect to the VM ( which is another VM, running on the same Mac, containing Red Hat Enterprise Linux ) could no longer connect.

This was a major PITA as the "client" VM was a WAS/BPM box that I was attempting to connect to Windows Server 2012 via LDAP ( provided by Active Directory ).

Both VMs were configured to use Network Address Translation (NAT), which meant that they were sharing the Mac's network interface.


The Mac itself is using my client's guest WiFi, and I have no other network connection from the Mac itself ( no wired, no Bluetooth etc. ).

As far as Windows was concerned, there was NO network, using IP v4 or IP v6.

VMware was acting as the DHCP server, which usually works …..

I disabled / enabled the network adapter within Windows, rebooted the VM etc. but to no avail.

I also shut down the VM and used VMware to change the virtual Media Access Control (MAC) address for the adapter, but again no dice.

I even deleted and recreated the VMware Network Adapter, but still no joy.

Finally, in desperation, I changed the IPv4 configuration within Windows to use a static IP address, in the same subnet as the "client" RHEL VM ( to 192.168.153.200 ) …..

And it started working ….

So I can only assume that something borked the Mac's DHCP server ( part of VMware Fusion ), but …..

Ah well, it's good to know for next time ….

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