Wednesday 19 August 2009

VMWare networking and Windows firewall

Couple of days ago a colleague and I were trying to set up 3 virtual windows 2008 servers in a domain (on VMWare's ESX as it happens). One domain controller (DC), one web and a database. Simple enough you'd think.

So we had a virtual switch set up routing to the DC with DHCP running and the other two servers set to dynamically pick-up IP addresses. However try as we might we couldn't get them to 'see' the DC using ping etc, yet everything looked OK on the switch and the TCP/IP settings on the servers. So we scratched our heads for a while - and I left for a meeting saying 'its as though we have a loose bit of virtual CAT5...'.

When I returned my colleague had cracked it. As you may have guessed from the title of this post it was Windows firewall all along. Turning it off on all 3 servers brought the network into life. Bit of a forehead-slapping 'doh' moment...

No comments: