I’ve recently upgraded my home lab to NSXT 3.2 along side with ESXi 7.0 U3. For a home lab setup I believe we periodically shut down the host to save some electricity bills. So after I had completed my NSXT configuration, I observed that my VMs will not be able to connect to the network every time I power down the entire host/environment. Initially I thought it was due to my shared VLAN setup that causes the issue. If you are interested with the shared VLAN setup do check out the link.
So after you power on back the host together with vCenter and NSX manager, you observed that VM network are showing disconnected. (which is connected to NSXT overlay segment) The segment is also showing no connection in the vCenter’s network page. Which is pretty normal.
You know that something went wrong when you try to power on your VM and the network is still showing disconnected. Even when you try to connect the network will be greeted with an error “Failed to connect virtual device ethernetxx”
I came across this VMware KB (74767) which is pretty similar to what I encountered. After digging through everywhere and numerous testing, I finally found the permanent resolution. The issue was finally resolved after patching my ESXi to 7.0 U3n.
In a production environment, you may still have a chance to encounter such issue. Please consider patching the ESXi hosts to U3n.
This is a fairly straightforward post and I hope that I can help you save some of your troubleshooting time. Be sure to check out other posts in my blog as well. 🙂