VMtools not running after failover

[stephen.loera]

Hello,

I have one VM running Windows Server 2012 R2. It uses a VMXNET3 NIC. In production the ESXi version is 5.5 however our recovery environment is ESX 6.0. Of all the 14 VMs I replicate only one has an issue with VMtools. It is installed, up-to-date, and the service is running on the source machine. Once I failover to the replica it shows VMtools Not Running(Out-of date), then changes to Running(Out-of-date), then to Not Running(Not Installed). After working with a Veeam engineer he determined that this VMware article describes the issues I am facing.

https://kb.vmware.com/selfservice/micro ... Id=1012693

On the source VM I have tried un-installing VMtools, rebooting, installing VMtools, rebooting, and finally replicating. However after failover I still have this issue.

So what should I do? This VM is the Domain Controller and it needs the NIC and the NIC needs VMtools. Can I script an install of VMtools after failover on this VM? Has anyone run into this issue? I'm looking for all the help I can get on this.

The support case ID on this is 02144402

Thank you.

[stephen.loera]

I was able to find the issue. Hopefully this will help someone else in the future. The source VM had the option to "Check and upgrade VMware Tools before each power on." It is described here:

https://blogs.vmware.com/vsphere/2016/0 ... -date.html

I unchecked this checkbox, ran the replication job again, tested the failover, and VMware Tools ran normally.

Hope this helps!