So has anyone else noticed this problem and found a way to resolve?
Basically I had 5 Windows 2003 R2 32 bit virtual machines running on our DOMAIN under VMware ESXi 5.0 - RETAIL PAID/NOT FREE.
Now we decided to upgrade to ESXi 5.1 and now NONE of the Windows 2003 machines can be found on the DOMAIN.
Are the machines working? YES Can the machines access the internet? YES Did I change anything during the upgrade? NO
Basically the VMs were exactly the same BEFORE/AFTER and the only thing upgraded was the Machine version and VMware tools, since ESXi 5.1 has a newer version but all other machines continued to work - Ubuntu, Windows 2008, Windows 8, Windows 2012 - but all the Windows 2003 machines are unable to regiser with the DOMAIN for some reason.
I can ping the DNS from the VM itself and it resolves properly, both LONG and SHORT name. i.e. QA-QTP-Test01 / QA -QTP-Test01.americas.corp.com
So basically no one else on the network can find these machines although it worked previously on ESXi 5.0.
I even went as far as creating a separate server that runs ESXi 5.0 and moved those specific machines BACK to the other machine with NO CHANGES and now they started working.
So now I changed machine version, NIC type, etc but NOTHING I do can make the Windows 2003 Machines work under ESXi 5.1.
This ONLY seems to affect DOMAIN registration, because otherwise you can access them directly via IP, RDP, Windows File Share, etc but you cannot use the DOMAIN name although it works under ESXi 5.0 which means 5.1 has a "bug".
Anyone else run this test or am I the first one? 