This is a note about how I fixed the disappearing eth0 in Gentoo Linux under VMWare Workstation. It should work for Server and ESXi as well.

The issue is that the module for the network card does not autoload. My inelegant solution was to hack /etc/init.d/net.lo to add these two lines:

modprobe pcnet32

depmod -a

after the last of the opening comments. I restarted /etc/init.d/net.eth0 and eth0 showed up and grabbed a DHCp address.

Hope others will find this useful.

Kevin