VM has network connectivity but network card showing as disconnected, having red cross on it

In this post I will talk about this minor issue where, System has network connectivity but network card showing as disconnected, having red cross on it.

Earlier I had seen this problem and drafted a blog post about it but never posted until recently when one of my friend faced the same issue but couldn’t find its cause/fix.

Now coming to the point, you might have seen this where you deployed a VM from template or rebooted a system and when the VM came up, you are able to connect to it but its network card in notification area having red cross on it (appearing disconnected).

If you would check from connectivity point of view, you wouldn’t find anything wrong here however most of the time you would like to get rid of this red cross sign.

If you would further investigate about the issue, then you will find this in Network and Sharing Center,

Here to fix this, you just need to check the status of  “Network Location Awareness service”, in this case either its stopped or set to disabled. This service should be set to automatic and in started state. 

As this issue was caused by a windows services so I don't think its specific to VM only, you might see this issue on a physical Windows system as well.

Note: “Network Location Awareness service” is responsible to collect and stores configuration information for the network and notifies programs when this information is modified. If this service is stopped, configuration information might be unavailable. If this service is disabled, any services that explicitly depend on it will fail to start. 

That’s it… :)