When you use windows 2012 or windows 8 in your environment, you probably run into disconnects from time to time. Setting up a Windows 2012 server in vSphere or vCloud director gives you the standard E1000E adapter. So if you didn’t change it from the start you will need to change it later on. Means little more work and downtime of your sever.

So log into your vCloud Director an navigate to your VM machine. Make sure you document the ip address of your NIC, subnet mask, gateway and DNs servers.

Power off the vApp if necessary and go to the properties of the Virtual Machine.

*make sure you know a local administrator account to log in when you start back up. If you don’t know log in first to the VM and change the local administrator password and enable it, or create an admin user.

** Also check if VMware tools are installed and that VMXNET3 driver is installed too.  Just click “Install VMware Tools” and  in your VM run the setup again but modify the setup.  You can check if the VMXNET3 driver is crossed out or installed. If not install it.

Choose the Hardware tab and scroll down to where NICs are.  To see what adapter type you have, check the box  “Show network adapter type”. Now you see that your adapter is E1000E. OK Lets change it. As you can see you can’t delete it.

So first you add a second NIC with the adapter type VMXNET3 and set it as primary. Then you can delete the E1000E adapter. The result should look something like the screenshot below.

Start you vApp back up and wait a while. It can take a little longer to boot because of the network connection problems. Once booted log in with a local administrator and navigate to the device manager. You should now see a VMXNET3 adapter in the ‘Network adapters’ section. The next screenshot shows that I didn’t had the VMware tools VMXNET3 driver installed so I had to install it first.

Before you set the ip address on the new NIC I like to uninstall the old one first. So turn on ‘Show hidden devices’ in the Device Manager in the view menu. Uninstall the Intel® 82574L Gigabit Network Connection. So now you can setup the NIC again with the old ip address. If you get an ip conflict that it is still in use then just confirm that you want to use this ip address on this adapter.

I like to restart the server again to get rid of all the errors.

That’s it so good luck.