FortiVM: problems with NICs on vsphere 5.5

[sofatime]

Hi, We have a FortiVM 64 running FortiOS 5.0.7 here with vmxnet2 for the NICs. This FortiVM has been working perfectly on vsphere 5.1 (and older). We have now upgraded to vsphere 5.5. Now whenever we do a snapshot on this VM the NICs lose connectivity. The problem can be solved by rebooting the FortiVM (using the console). I also did the following tests: - tested the same setup on another vsphere 5.5 installation - tested the following FortiOS versions: 5.0.8, 5.0.9, 5.2.0 - tested with vmxnet3 With all these setups the problem occurred. Also I get a compatibility warning in virtual center when I migrate such a VM to another host (" Virtual ethernet card ' Network adapter 1' is not supported. This is not a limitation of the host in general, but of the virtual machine' s configured guest OS on the selected host." ). I then also tested 5.0.7 with the e1000 driver for the NICs. There the problem does not occur and also the compatibility warning does not appear. So it seems that FortiVM with vmxnet2 or vmxnet3 are not working correctly on vsphere 5.5 (although FortiNet provides OVF files for vmxnet2 and vmxnet3) and we probably need to switch to e1000. Did anyone else experience this and how did you solve it? Thank you! Daniel

[SgtMalicious]

I' m using the e1000 OVF and haven' t any problems with it. Might be a bug in the kernel drivers.

[hklb]

vmxnet3 has better performance as e1000. So I suggest you to don' t migrate to e1000. If you read the datasheet of fortiVM, you will see that the ESX5.5 is not officially supported : http://www.fortinet.com/sites/default/files/productdatasheets/FortiGate-VM01.pdf Hypervisor Support : VMware ESX/ESXi 4.0/4.1/5.0/5.1, Citrix XenServer 5.6 SP2/6.0 or later, Open Source Xen 3.4.3/4.1 or later, Microsoft Hyper-V 2008 R2/2012, KVM

[hklb]

Forget what I said before.. fortivm support ESX 5.5 (see on documentation http://docs.fortinet.com/uploaded/files/1734/fortigate-vm-install-50.pdf)