We ran into some trouble on a few VMs in our LAB after we upgarded to vSphere 5.   For some reason once powered on  the VM NICs were not showing as connected. And ergo, the VMs were without network connectivity.

<a href="http://egroup.jasonmangone.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/10/notConnected.jpg"><img class="aligncenter size-medium wp-image-5310" src="http://egroup.jasonmangone.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/10/notConnected-300x65.jpg" alt="" width="300" height="65" /></a>

So the next step of course was to click connected and apply.  But to no avail this did not work.  The virtual NICs still would not connect and the device status did not change.  So the quick fix was to add a new vNIC and then reapply the IP settings at the OS level.  This worked fine for a few severs but would not scale well if we had to role out massive amounts of new VMs.  Which of course we  do for the up coming <a title="Carolina Technology Conference " href="http://www.carolinatechnologyconference.com/">Carolina Technology Conference</a>.

So, knowing we needed to change our core base image VM for our <a title="VMware View 5" href="http://www.vmware.com/products/view/features.html">VMware View 5</a> deployment, I started to do some digging.  It turns out that <a title="vShield" href="http://www.vmware.com/products/vshield/overview.html">vShield</a> is the culpret here and the problem was solved by excluding the following line in the .vmx file for the VM in question with a "#".

#ethernet0.filter0.name = "vshield-dvfilter-module"

Now of course comes the challenge of figuring how and why <a title="vShield" href="http://www.vmware.com/products/vshield/overview.html">vShield</a> managed to go hay wire during the upgrade.....