I am not 100% sure this is VMware related, but I am having this weird networking problem with my 2008 R2 VMs. On VMs with a static IP, about every 2nd or 3rd time I reboot them, they come up with no network connectivity and a 169.x.x.x autoconfig address. Rebooting the VM brings back the static IP and full network function. If it was just a network connectivity or driver issue, you'd think my IP would still be there, so I am baffled. Mostly the fact that a reboot breaks it and then a reboot fixes it is what is perplexing. It would make more sense if it just stayed broke and then I could troubleshoot. I even totally redid my VMware image and newly deployed VMs have this issue, too. So either I am systemically doing something wrong, or I have a weird bug. Patching is a nightmare because of this, as you can imagine.
I thought maybe this KB article would have something to do with it:Virtual machine is assigned an invalid IP address after a reboot
But it mentions "The guest operating system network interface with a static IP address fails to communicate with the network until the IP address is changed to DHCP and then back to a static IP address". These work as soon as I reboot, every time. Also, I have 200 VMs and the problem is random so I can't very well fix every single one with a unique registry key (well I'd rather not).
Any ideas?