How to change E1000 into VMXNET3 vNIC on a Windows VM
No matter what the situation, there may be a requirement to change the vNIC of a VM from E1000 to VMXNET3. In my case I have changed my whole network infrastructure to 10 Gbit, Linux VMs are easy to migrate but Windows VMs are a little bit problematic, so I want to show you with this example how it works.
Using the VMXNET Generation 3 (VMXNET3) adapters in VMware vSphere has better performance, less overhead, and lower CPU usage when compared with the traditional E1000 NIC or previous vmxnet generations.
The VMXNET3 adapter is a new generation of a paravirtualized NIC designed for performance, and is not related to VMXNET or VMXNET 2. It offers all the features available in VMXNET 2 and adds several new features like multiqueue support (also known as Receive Side Scaling in Windows), IPv6 offloads, and MSI/MSI-X interrupt delivery.
Step 1: Power off your Virtual machine (VM) in the VMware Console, remote console or web client.
Step 2: Right-click the VM > Edit Settings > Next to the Network adapter, click the Delete “X” sign.
Then you’ll see a message saying that the “Device will be removed” or the line will be gone.
Step 3: Click on the top Add Network Adapter and choose Network Adapter > Choose VMXNET3 under Adapter type
Then choose the proper VM network you want the VM to connect to and don’t forget to check “Connect At Power On” if you want the VM has network connectivity and save.
Step 4: In this example, we’re talking about a Windows Server 2019 VM, so we’ll switch to Network Connections and see the VMXNET3 NIC is there. We edit the properties and assign the same IP address from the E1000 NIC
Step 5: To locate the Ghost NIC, we open the command prompt and run this command:
set devmgr_show_nonpresent_devices=1
Step 6: Start the Device Manager by running this command from the same command prompt:
start devmgmt.msc
The Device Manager appears
Step 7: Click View > Show Hidden Devices
Step 8: Expand the Network Adapters tree and view the Ghost network adapter
Step 9: Right-click the dimmed NIC, then click Uninstall
Step 10: Once all of the grayed out NICs are uninstalled, assign the IP address to the VMXNET3 NIC
netsh interface ip set address "Ethernet0 2" static 192.168.34.221 255.255.255.0 192.168.34.1
After we have assigned our static IP, our network status is set to connected.
Source: https://kb.vmware.com/s/article/1179
And that’s it, if you have any questions just leave a comment. 🙂