vmxnet or flexible?

[Deeshey]

Hi all

I perform the upgrade of some VM's esx 2.5 to esx 3.0.1 (dmotion).

In Some VM's the new adapter say "vmxnet" and in others vm's says "flexible". Why the diference??. Both machines are windows 2000 and after the upgrade the adapter is different.

The question is..because in some vms the adapter is vmxnet and others are "flexible"

(sorry by the english

[doubleH]

have you upgraded or installed vmtools in the guest os?

[cheeko]

In VI3 the NIC of choice is vlance (=flexible).

It's basically the vmxnet driver (for performance) presenting itself as AMD PCNet Adapter (for compatibility) to the system.

cheeko

P.S.: You can change that in the VM's vmx file.

Message was edited by:

cheeko

[Deeshey]

>have you upgraded or installed vmtools in the guest os?

upgraded

[olafgradin]

I have found that none of the resolutions surrounding this problem account for the case in which the VMX file is not modified appropriately for updated hardware.

In my case, I had VM's that I migrated from ESX 2.5.x to 3.0.1 (39823), previously using VMXNET drivers for Gb performance. After the migration, hardware updates, and VMTools updates (vmware-vmupgrade.exe), I found that VM's were still noted as using the VMXNET driver within the VMX files. The way in which I was able to get them updated was to delete the lines from the VMX files respective of the vmxnet definition.

ethernet[i]x[/i].virtualDev = "vmxnet"

You could just as easily change that to "vlance," but it seems that the newer version of ESX doesn't need it with the Flexible driver. Once done, I could bring up the VM and see that my connection was connecting at 1Gb/s as it should. Depending on the state of your tools, you may actually need to reinstall the VMTools at this point to switch off of the vmxnet driver equivalent in your OS.