VM's under ESXi 4.0 recognize NIC as USB

[adambg]

Hello,

I have a Dell PowerEdge R300 running licensed VMware ESXi 4.0.

The server has onboard Intel Gigabit ET Dual Port network adapter, and I added another PCIe Broadcom NetXtreme II 5709.

I installed Windows 2003 Server as VM, and after installation complete, the 2003 recognize the network card as USB and shows the systray icon.

This allows me to "Safely remove hardware" -> "Safely remove Intel PRO 1000/MT".

Ofcourse if I do that I will loose networking on that server... Ha! so much for the "safely".

Anyway, when I created the VM I used the VMware defaults NIC Adapter E1000.

I could choose E1000, Flexible, VMXNET 2 (enhanced), and VMXNET 3.

Is there any way to disable removal of the NIC from Windows? Or must I shutdown the VM, install another NIC and restart?

Thanks.

[Kasraeian]

All NIC (e1000, vmxnet, ...) would be shown as USB and can be removed using "safe remove".

But i saw a way to stop the shrink feature in guest OS, may be with that concept and instruction you can stop safe remove of NIC.

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[Kasraeian]

I hope this link can help you, its about disabling the shrink feature for virtual guest os as I mention before.

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[adambg]

Well, I couldn't cast the shrink method to disable the USB-NIC problem. By the way I am not installing VMware Tools on the guest OS's.

I might have found a path. This link shows all VMX parameters..

Though I can't see anything interesting there..

Thanks for your reply, let me know if you have any other solution...

[Kasraeian]

I have question, is this system (guest) is in domain? so may be you can prevent user by using Group Policy to not working with USB Devices (adding or removing).

By the way, Is there any reason that you didn't installed the VMware tools in the Guest OS? If there's no specific reason, I offer to install it because you will get better performance (as it recommended by VMware itself to install VMware tools inside your guest - Source)

Don't Forget VMware Tools
It is very important that you install VMware Tools in the guest operating system.

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[Borja_Mari · Accepted solution]

Hi,

it is a best practice to install the vmware tools in the guest. I would recommend you always to install the vmware tools.

The vNIC issue you are talking about, isn't really a bug, is a new feature called vNIC hot plugging.

Anyway is you want to disable it to prevent accidentally removing the vNIC, you can disable the network card hot plug following this steps:

The above steps doesn't affect cpu/memory hot plug.

Un saludo/Regards,

Pablo

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[adambg]

Perfect! It worked.

I didn't install VMware Tools cuz I bumped into a blog which said it will slow down the VM's..

I cannot find this blog now...

I'll start installing VMware Tools now.

Thanks for your help!

[Kasraeian]

Hi

Thanks for the help, it's interesting but I have a question now?

Is it disabling all hot plug devices?

devices.hotplug = "false"

If yes, So it means that if I'm using this to prevent accidentally removing the vNIC, I can't hot add virtual disk to my system too?

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