I am having what appears to be either a networking or guest startup issue with Windows 2008 R2 SP1 guest machines on my VSphere Essentials setup. Configuration is:
HP BL460C G7 servers, 72GB RAM, with built in Emulex dual port 10Gb NICs and mezzanine NC632M dual port NICs (total 4 per host).
NICs connected to HP C3000 blade enclosure and GBe2C HP (Nortel) interconnect switches which are then uplinked to HP 5304 modular switch
ESXi 4.1 Update 1 with Emulex driver update
The issue I am seeing is that when Windows 2008 R2 boots (this can be on a new install or a P2Ved install) it throws a NETLOGON 5719 (unable to establish a secure connection) error in the event log followed closely by a windows time lookup failure warning. I can log in OK and the errors do not reoccur, Group Policy applies OK and the time service syncs a couple of seconds after the initial warning.
This only happens if the NIC is set to a static IP address. If I set it to DHCP (same address details as the static one), I do not get any errors at all.
What appears to be happening is that NETLOGON is starting before the network has completely initialised. I have tried making it depend on another service etc, disabled portfast/STP on the switches and have seen no change. I have also read an MS article which says it can be ignored, however I don't like random errors and I have not seen this before in similar deployments with similar hardware. We don't have any issues on physical servers running the same OS, even if they are in the same blade enclosure, or on Windows 2003 VMs.
Has anyone else noticed this behaviour?