Due to a corporate merge, the IP schema for our servers must be changed from a 192.168.225.X network to 10.165.1.X
I have followed the simple method of using esxcfg-vswif to alter the IP, Netmask, and VLAN of the vswif then edit the network file to add the new gateway, then restart network services (and subsequently the entire server). My network cables are not reversed, yada yada.
Invariably, every single VMWare server exhibits the following symptoms after the change:
Issuing a "route" command results in a five second delay prior to listing the final line showing the default gateway. (all entries are correct, however)
Unable to ping the default gateway, with a "Destination Host Unreachable" error. (It seems unlikely one would recieve this error on a flat network segment....)
The Host cannot be pinged at all, even from the switch it is connected to.
Now I've seen a lot of people post about this problem, and out of 11 ESX server, I've experienced the problem 11 times. Manual deletion of the vSwif and vSwitch often corrects the problem, sometimes does not, resulting in having to rebuild server from scratch in order to get working again.
There's really no excuse for such a simple process yielding so much difficulty.