Allow Virtual machines with duplicate MAC address on vSphere 5.5
In a migration project to VMware vSphere 5.5 I bumped into duplicate MAC address issue (I found out after some investigation).
Some info on the setup.
There are ESXi hosts that we are migrating from 5.0 to 5.5. Some VM’s where 2 VM’s (VM1 and VM2) share the same MAC address (production and test machine).
On ESXi 5.0 these 2 VM’s can run together on the same ESXi host.
I want to move the VM’s to an already upgraded ESXi 5.5 host, the first VM (VM1 moves without any problems. ) For the second VM (VM2) I get following error during vMotion. Same error happens when I cold migrate the VM2 to the same host (ESXi 5.5) as VM1 and try to power VM2 on.
After some Google research I came across following blog
http://jasonnash.com/2008/08/30/disabling-mac-address-checking-in-vmware/
And adding the advanced setting to VM2 fixed the problem.
VMware vCenter Error Call “PropertyCollector.RetrieveContents” for object “propertyCollector” on vCenter Server failed
A customer of mine called me with a weird problem with a Template which was converted back to a Virtual Machine. See here the problem which occurs when the customer wanted to edit the settings of this VM.
The cause of this problem is that an ISO was mounted from a datastore which does not exist anymore.
To solve this problem, just connect to the ESX host where the VM is registered on. Edit the setting here and put the CDROM on “Client Device”.
Then check on which datastore the VM is located. Then unregister and register the VM again in the ESX host. Now you are able again to edit jthe setting of this VM via vCenter