VMware vSphere Issue : No Outbound Network Connectivity
June 27, 2011 
Sean Crookston 
I have spent the last couple months packing and unpacking for a move and after finally getting my lab close to being back in order found a really weird issue going on with one of my ESXi hosts. For some reason, the system no longer had any outbound network connectivity.
The issue boggled my mind and I tried everything I could to restore the network connectivity to those existing NICs. I even powered down the system and moved the Network card over to another slot, which caused the system to create 2 new VMNICs. As I continued further down the troubleshooting path the only thing I could find that eventually would work was to break out the CLI and I removed the management VMK and the entire management port group and then recreated it.
I spent quite a bit of time going through the basics of network troubleshooting, and took a quick look at VMware’s Network Resolution path to make sure I wasn’t missing anything. I had some virtual machines stored locally on disk for my lab and didn’t want to lose those, so I proceeded to install ESXi on a new hard disk to make sure there wasn’t some kind of hardware issue with my system. And there wasn’t, everything worked fine.
In the end I was reminded of a very important thing that I should have focused on up front, the ESXi hosts are fairly stateless and it was easier to just wipe the network out and recreate it. I also learned about a nice little feature that I had never noticed before as described below that allows you to reset the system configurations to their defaults, which would of worked great in this situation. The only repercussion would have been needing to go in and manually register each of the virtual machines again.
Tags: 
