Why does upgrade from 5.0 to 5.1 change MAC addresses in guests?

[kjhurni]

Out of curiosity, why does upgrading from ESXi 5.0 to 5.1 cause the virtual adapter in Linux guests to change MAC addresses?

Before and after, Vmware reports it's an E1000 adapter being presented to the OS.

SLES 11 SP1 (and SP2) 64-bit I've seen this on so far.

Not sure about SLES10 SP3/SP4

[JCMorrissey]

Hi,

Take a look at http://cormachogan.com/2013/01/24/heads-up-valid-static-address-ranges-in-vsphere-5-1/ and see if your mac addresses in the affected range, details reasons for the change in it too.

Many tx

[kjhurni]

Thanks, we're not using Vcenter for these particular servers.  We're using the free ESXi version, so not sure if it still applies.

As for static MAC Addresses, I think ours are like:

00:0c:29:f9:XX:XX

So I THINK that means all of my machines that I upgrade will have this issue?

Thanks!

[JCMorrissey · Accepted solution]

Hi,

Indeed looks like that relates to them machines so -  we noticed similar affects upgrading a hosts the RHEL vm's we had switched MAC's. Also won't matter you have no vCenter in place.

Many tx