Has anyone seen an issue where after an upgrade from Windows 2008 R2 to Windows 2008 R2 SP1 the virtual network device suddenly and somewhat randomly ejects itself from the VM causing the virtual network device to not only disappear within the VM OS, but also from the virtual machine hardware configuration (essentially modifying the VMX config)?
I understand that the hotplug capability is enabled by default, but I can't seem to figure out why the device is apparently "auto-ejecting" itself. After talking with VMware support, we confirmed that the hotplug disconnect is definitely being initiated (from analyzing the logs through putty on the host where the VM is running).
There is no evidence that anyone is logging in and intentionally ejecting the VMXNET3 Ethernet Controller (either by safely removing the device or by removing it from the device manager), so our assumption at this point is that it is something within the OS that is causing it to occur. The Windows event logs do not show anything preceding the event, other than the errors related to a loss of network connectivity (once the NIC device disappears).
VMware did point out that this can occur in environments where VMware View is involved, but we are not using View in this environment. Additionally, we do not see this phenomenon on non-SP1 Windows 2008 R2 servers (at least not yet).