ESXi - Strange Problems with Connectivity

[Zeon]

Hey Guys,
I was at the datacenter last night and after what should have been a very simple job of replacing a dead HDD on our ESXi 4.1 host, ESXi spat the dummy and I had to do a repair install. After redoing the config on the ESXi after the repair install (repair install keeps all VMFS volumes but deletes the config) all of the VMs came up successfully except PFsense. I did have to add the VMs from their VMX files in the datastores. PFsense would come up but some of the interfaces wouldn't pass traffic. Also other strange things happened like trying to reset the web configurator to port 80 would result in the console hanging.

I ended up having to completely reinstall PFsense to get it working. Anyone else experienced something similar?

[the.it.dude]

I had something similar…

I did a fresh install of pfSense in ESXi.  After adding the VMTools package and rebooting, I lost all connectivity.  Without having web access to pf, I didn't know how to remove the package via the command line.  I didn't spend any further time troubleshooting.  I just moved on to testing something else.

But, in your situation it may also be related to the VM Tools package (if you had it installed)

Jeff

[Zeon]

Oh yes I had only recently installed the open VM tools package and hadn't restarted the VMs since then. I'll do some testing tot ry and isolate it and if it is causing issues I'll recommend to unpublish from the package list until its reliable.