Two of my servers are randomly dropping their default gateway address. It does not occur every day but every so often without any cause that I can see. Both are virtual machines but are running on two completely different physical servers and manage different content, nothing about these two are the same with the exception that they are both running server 2003 and both hosting web servers. Not only are they completely different but I also have several other virtual machines running on the same physical servers doing similar tasks that are problem free. When I check the properties for the NIC's it shows the gateway as being statically assign but when I check through ipconfig the gateway is missing. The work around is very simple, I change the statically assigned gateway apply, and then change it back to the correct gateway and everything resets and works fine. My concern is that these are production web servers and when this glitch occurs the web sites go down. Does anyone have any ideas as to what could cause the connection to drop its gateway and how this could be prevented?

Hi Jon, To narrow down the root cause of the issue, can you please check if there are multiple network connections that have the same default gateway settings on both of the two problematic servers? If there are multiple default gateways on the production server, please keep the default gateway on the Internet connection NIC. The default gateway is used only for traffic that needs to go to a network for which the server has no route. There is only one default gateway active for a computer at a time. We need to generally configure the default gateway on the most complex network, and leave the field blank on the other network adapter. For more reference, please see the following article 157025 Default Gateway Configuration for Multihomed Computershttp://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;EN-US;157025 Hope it helps.David Shen - MSFT