Protected System has no Connectivity in live mode when a Nested VM

Replibit does not support virtual installations of appliances and vaults in production.  Use at your own risk.

Issue:

     Appliance or Vault is running as a virtual machine on Vmware
     When performing a Live virtualization of a protected system recovery point, the running machine can get a DHCP address but has no network connectivity

Resolution:

     Modify the properties of the virtualized Appliance/Vault .  Change the network adapter from “E1000” to VMXNET3”

Important!!  Do not use the Vmware GUI tools to remove and re-add the network card, as this will change the adapter MAC address.  Changing the network card can break the back-end engine and require a reset to factory defaults to recover from.  Instead, perform the following:

Shut down the affected virtual Appliance or Vault

From the ESX console or VMware client, enable the ESX shell and SSH
Connect to the ESX host via SSH
Change directory to /vmfs/volumes/<data store name>/<guest server name>

Note: when typing in the path, press <Tab> to complete the path name automatically.  Press <Tab> twice to enumerate all possible choices at this point.

Use ‘vi’ to edit the virtual machine definition file <server name>.vmx

Note:  For those unfamiliar with ‘vi’

1. Navigate the document with PgUp/PgDn and cursor keys like any other word processor
2. Press ‘I’ to enable Insert (editing) mode
3. Press <ESC> to exit Insert mode
4. Press ‘:qw’ to exit the editor and save changes
5. If you make a mistake and would like to exit without saving changes, press ‘:q!’

Locate the line ethernet0.virtualDev = “e1000”
Edit and change “e1000” to “vmxnet3”
Save and exit from ‘vi’

Power on the Appliance/Vault and wait for it to completely boot and mount the storage pool

Proceed with Live virtualization, running machines will now have network access