We've had issues with this after GA and are pursuing some kind of way to address this directly. I agree that DHCP is kind of a lame workaround, though it does work for most people. This is only an issue on ESXi standalone and Hyper-V, with ESXi managed by vCenter, you can assign a static IP directly to the VM using the management/configuration tools on the vCenter side.
At this point the best secondary workaround is to use ARP to cache an address for the MAC of your virtual appliance on some secondary system, then access it and set a static IP. We're spinning up a KB on this but here's the gist - note that if we're talking about Hyper-V, the easiest place to do this is on your Hyper-V management system/hypervisor itself:
- Go to your VM appliance and record the MAC address.
- On a Windows (or whatever, but instructions will be for Windows) system on the SAME network segment as the VM, assign a manual ARP entry for that MAC to some static IP on the right segment. Make sure it's not an IP that's in use or assigned to another system in any way, shape, or form.
- Open a command prompt with administrative privileges
- Confirm your IP address that's on the same network (use ipconfig /all if you need to)
- Use arp:
arp -s 192.168.250.250 00-50-56-be-06-9f 192.168.250.17- 192.168.250.250 is the IP you'll reference the VM from - make sure to pick something not in use.
- 00-50-56-be-06-9f is the MAC address of the VM
- 192.168.250.17 is your IP address on the same network segment
- Go to https://192.168.250.250:5480 (in this example, whatever IP address you arp'ed for the VM), log in with admin/admin, and change the IP, then reboot.
We have used this successfully with other customers (or I should say, other customers have used these instructions successfully).
