Microsoft’s Convenience Update breaks VMware networking

Two days ago, Microsoft recently released a Convenience Update patch for Windows 7 and Windows Server 2008 R2 SP1. This update has incompatibility issues with virtual machines running on the VMware vSphere virtualization platform. This incompatibility is confined to one specific configuration scenario: It impacts VMs that use the VMware VMXNet3 virtual network adapter type.

Please note, it involves this update by Microsoft

As most of us out there use this network adapter, it can become quite an issue if you roll this out over your VM’s. Basically, they will become unresponsive at the network. On the blogpage VMware posted the following:

VMware is aware of this issue and we are actively investigating the root causes and possible fixes. While this effort progresses, VMware is advising customers to delay applying the Microsoft “Convenience Update” to any virtual machine that uses the VMXNet3 vNIC type.

VMware will provide further updates as they become available.

To resolve this issue uninstall the Convenience Update patch.

More details available at the VMware Blog page.