CentOS 5.6 Guest on ESXi 4.1 Host unable to connect to internet or internal network

[azes]

Hi,

Thank you in advance for your help. I am very new to Linux and ESXi. Any help will be greatly appreciated.

I'm setting up a lab environment at home. I was able to complete the ESXi installation on the hardware (DL580 G3 w/ 4 x 3.0 Xenon Processors and 16 GB RAM). This server only has 1 active NIC. I was also able to provision a CentOS 5.6 virtual machine.

I can connect to the host using vSphere so I'm assuming the network connectivity at the host level is ok.

I ran into issues when I tried to access the internet from the guest. I wanted to download and install VMWare tools on the guest. When opening the network configuration dialogue in the CentOS GUI eth0 shows as Inactive. I confirmed that the guest is configured to use DHCP and IPv6 is disabled at the guest and host.

Are there any configuration tasks that I need to perform to activate the network after a CentOS installation?

I initially thought the problem was the lack of a 2nd NIC but after reading several forums online it seems that I should be able to have the VM Network and Management Network on the vSwitch (which uses the singles NIC).

I have enclosed a screenshot of the vSwitch configuration.

vSwitch Configuration.jpgvSwitch Properties.jpg

[azes]

I re-created the virtual machine from scratch and the issue was somehow resolved. For other people that run into this issue I selected IPv4 and IPv6 support during the CentOS installation (even though IPv6 is disabled at the host level). This is the only thing I did differently and somehow it seems to have fixed the issue.