Upgrading your NT guests on your vSphere Hosts

March 15, 2010

Yep! Still have some NT guest Virtual Machines hanging out there. 🙂 During a recent VI3 to vSphere upgrade, we had just finished upgrading both vCenters, upgraded Site Recovery Manager, upgraded all the ESX hosts to ESX4 and were now upgrading the VM Tools and then upgrading the Virtual Hardware on the Virtual Machines. We had devised our plan to upgrade the VMTools BEFORE upgrading the Virtual Hardware to avoid any IP related issues.

Of course, after upgrading the VMTools and then the Virtual Hardware on the NT guests, no IP addresses! Argh! After searching around the OS for the actual NICs (yeah – It’s been a LONG time) We were able to re-install the vmxnet driver and everything worked fine.

Here’s a quick refresher for those that don’t remember NT. 🙂

To add a virtual network adapter

1. Right-click the Network Neighborhood tab and select Properties.

2. Click the Adapters tab.

3. Remove the existing adapter and add a new adapter. Specify the new path as C:\winntsystem32.

4. To add a a virtual network adapter as AMD PCNet driver, select AMD PCNET Family Ethernet adapter. Specify the path as C:\winntsystem32 and reboot the virtual machine.

5. To add a virtual network adapter to vmxnet driver, click Have disk and specify path as C:\Program FilesVMwareVMware ToolsDriversvmxnet. Upgrade to the latest VMware Tools version

and reboot the virtual machine.

Here is the KB article that got us moving in the right direction :
https://kb.vmware.com/selfservice/microsites/search.do?language=en_US&cmd=displayKC&externalId=1007168