I recently performed a VM Clone (without customization). After powering on the Clone I found a new vNIC had been created. The old NIC was now a Ghiost as referenced in KB Article1179. I've seen and corrected this for various reasons when using converter or upgrading VM Hardware but, I didn't expect it on a simple Clone (without customization). Is this normal, expected behavior when cloning?
It is essentially a simple Clone but, there were a few steps to get there. I know it sounds convoluted but, there were reasons:
- VM built on ESXi 4.1 (build 348481)
- I unregistered from that Host and registered to another Host sharing the datastore. That Host is ESXi 4.1 (build 43372).
- I then created a thin provisioned Clone of the VM on that same Host.
- I cold migrated that Clone to yet another Host. That Host is ESXi 4.1 (build 348481).
- Lastly, I did a Storage Migration to thick provision it. That's when I powered it on and noticed the original statically assigned IP was gone and a new vNIC created.
Back to my original question. Would you expect these things to generate a new vNIC?
