Guest not using MAC address assigned to it in VM settings.

bermovick

I ran into a weird problem at work yesterday, and I'm wondering if anyone has any idea of the root cause.

At work our laptops are running Redhat, with a windows VM within VMware Workstation. All addresses are statically assigned (no DHCP), so when I first started the VM, I went into network settings to assign it an address and everything. After doing so, I still wasn't able to reach anything.

I verified the information under the NIC config and it was good, but ipconfig showed a 169 address still! I eventually noticed the MAC address reported by ipconfig /all did NOT match what Workstation had assigned for that NIC. The "hardware" settings for the NIC under windows didn't show a MAC address manually set, and removing the "device", rebooting, and letting windows re-discover it still used the incorrect one. Once I went back into the hardware settings and forced windows to use the MAC that Workstation had assigned, everything worked, but I think it would probably be better to find what was causing windows to use the wrong address in the first place. Has anyone ever seen this, or have any idea where windows is getting this other MAC address from?

joelsfood

have you tried manually editing the VMX to see what it shows for the MAC address in there?

bermovick

I haven't. I left work early today to pick up my daughter and take her out to lunch with my mom who was driving through. I'll take a look on Tuesday.

joelsfood

At least you have your priorities straight.

Take a look and let us know, that's first place to look. Or rather, first place after looking in the driver settings in Windows, which you've already checked.