Windows 10 VM – No Internet and No Domain on Network Adapter

I’ve had a niggling problem with my homelab that resulted in Windows 10 VMs constantly having issues with on-premises domain applications.

Outlook for example would regularly become disconnected from Exchange, with no amount of attempting to re-establish the connection working, despite other network tests such as ping, file share, DNS resolution and RDP working with no problem.

When this occurred, the network icon in the notification area would change to the disconnected globe, and the status of the network would show “No Internet”, despite the above tests being successful and the internet being available.

Disabling/re-enabling the network adapter would get the network back to its normal state, and I would guess the fact the adapter wasn’t reporting as being on the domain was the culprit in terms of Outlook connectivity. Below shows the normal working state after resetting the network adapter.

I suspected there might be some kind of standby issue, so as a test, I set the VM’s Power & Sleep settings to 1 minute for “When plugged in, PC goes to sleep” (default is 30 minutes). And sure enough, after 1 minute, the adapter was back in the “No Internet” state.

A simple solution for me was to create a group policy that set the Active Power Plan for machines to “High Performance”, which includes setting the sleep value to “Never” for all machines, which seems to have resolved the problem.