Intermittent Network Connectivity Failures in Windows 2012 on VMWare with VMXNET3 Driver

Over the past several weeks we’ve had issues with some servers sporadically dropping off the network and quickly regaining connection. Network connectivity was checked and tests were ran but nothing was found. One commonality among the servers is that each is running in VMWare and use the vmxnet3 driver as the main NIC driver. After reading a couple of articles about potential issues surrounding this driver we opened up perfmon to check for discarded packets and found that it was discarding them at an alarming rate.

 

After reading the following article:

Large packet loss at the guest OS level on the VMXNET3 vNIC in ESXi

we made the prescribed changes and haven’t experienced issues since.

How to keep your remote desktop session active when it's minimized

If you have an interactive application running on a machine that you have open in an RDP session and you want the app to continue to run when the RDP session is minimized you'll have to make some changes to the registry on your computer (not the remote computer).

Original blog post

The general steps are to modify the registry by doing the following:

locate the key:

HKLM\Software\Microsoft\Terminal Server Client\

add a DWORD value in this key, naming it "RemoteDesktop_SuppressWhenMinimized", and give it the value 2.


If you're a 64-bit client, add that value to this key:HKLM\Software\Wow6432Node\Microsoft\Terminal Server Client\