Mr_Rabbit

Our network guy figured it out. Here are his findings, could be helpful if anyone ever does a similar migration that results in a similar issue.

Thanks for the reply! The domain is already listed as the search domain in network settings. I should have mentioned that these machines are part of a golden triangle configuration, where they pull domain & account info from Active Directory and some management settings from Open Directory. The domain info is populated during the binding process. One more bit of info, pinging "Server1" is successful, packets make the round trip and the FQDN populates automatically. This seems to just be something with the SMB side of things. I know there have been issues starting with 10.7 regarding SMB connectivity but we haven't had any issues for the most part, at least until now, following the migration of the file server to a VM. Any other ideas?

I'm not sure whether this would be better asked here or in the virtual forum. I'm giving this a shot first though since it seems to be an issue localized to Macs. In our building we have a couple of different Windows file servers that are typically reachable by connecting via smb and the server name in Finder, such as smb://Server1 A couple of days ago one of our network engineers moved one of these file servers to vmware. Following the process all of the Windows machines & 10.6 Macs can connect using the short server name but our 10.7 & 10.8 machines can only reach it by using the IP address or FQDN, such as smb://Server1.department.domain.extension. Attempting to connect using smb://Server1 in 10.7 & 10.8 will eventually time out with "There was a problem connecting to the server 'Server 1'. The Server may not exist or it is unavailable at this time. Check the server name or IP address, check your network connection, and then try again." The only exception to this that I've found is our 10.7 server, it can connect via smb://Server1. This feels like a DNS issue but with the Windows boxes, 10.6 Macs and the 10.7 server connecting I'm at somewhat of a loss. Anyone run into a similar situation when migrating a file server over to a virtualized environment? Any ideas?