On one of our clusters we take nightly backups of VMs and we are encountering issues with one of them.
It is a licenses server and has two pass through USB devices connected for licensing. It is running Server 2003 & a flexible adapter.
Each night when the snapshot is first taken it loses it's network connectivity and this connectivity does not return. The only ways to get it back are by restarting the VM or by disconnecting and reconnecting the vmnic.
At the same time network connectivity is lost windows system logs show and error about removal of the two USB devices but nothing about the nic.
The vmware.log shows nothing unusual, VC events show no errors.
The backup process runs across many machines and no others show this problem, I have successfully replicated the problem by taking a snapshot manually so I do not thing it is about the backups.
The host shows no resource congestion or contention at the time this happens.
I have a feeling that the USB devices are at the bottom of this somehow but if anyone has seen anyting like this before I would welcome any pointers.