Forpeople that have been running for a while with VMware, they know wealways had 2 choices of NIC interfaces in our Virtual Machine. Thevlance (AMD PCNET 32) nic and the vmxnet (VMware NIC). This disappearedas the current vlance card became ‘intelligent’, when you have VMwareTools running in your VM, automatically optimized code is being used totalk to the NIC interface. If VMware Tools is not loaded is just runswith basic AMD emulation.
But today (I am still learning everyday) I found out we have a newchoice. We can also have an Intel PRO 1000/MT in our Virtual Machines.I have tested it with VMware Workstation 5.5 and ESX3(beta2), but amvery sure this also works in VMware Player and VMware Server.
So how do we get this Intel Pro 1000/MT card in our VM, well quitesimple. Edit your .VMX file and make sure the Ethernet configurationhas this line in it:
ethernet0.virtualDev = “e1000”
Under most products this works easily, except for ESX3(beta2). Ifound that in my ESX3/VC2 environment, some stupid engine in thebackground every time changes my configuration back. After some longfrustrating testing, I found a solution. How? Well change the .VMX filewith vi. Save it but leave VI open. Now power on the Virtual Machine.VI will keep the file locked, so ESX can not change it back andvoila.. it works.
So now the question of course is, why should I do this? Well in mycase I started playing with this, because I had a virtual appliancethat did network analysis. And the software company only had itconfigured for an Inter Pro 1000 NIC, so I had to make this change.
Now aware of this change, I was of course curious if there was aperformance difference between the vlance and intel pro NIC. Well I amnot allowed to publish benchmark tests, but I can tell you there is.But in different scenarios I had different winners. TCP pure networkthe vlance was faster, UDP pure network the Intel won by far. Doingfile copying (so disk and network) the intel won frequent as well. Soif you have a VM that really needs to squeeze every bit of power out ofa NIC, go have a test and see which one works for you. Of course notonly NIC speed should be considered in this equation, but also thedifference in CPU usage.
I also think I know why the Intel Pro 1000 card was introduced inthe VM. All 64bit Virtual Machines use this card by default. As thereis a 64 bit driver available for this NIC and not for the Vlance card.But in my tests I was able to also put this NIC in my 32bit virtualmachines.
Any ideas if this works on GSX Server 3.2.1?
I wasn’t able to get this working, evenlocking the VM with the vi editor. The VM still shows a VMware PCIadapter installed. I’m using ESX 2.5.2 with Patch 3 installed andW2K3SP1 on my VM.
Just to clarify. The intel pro 1000 NIC isonly available on VMware products that support running 64bit virtualmachines. So not ESX 2.x or GSX 3.x.
Does this trick works on 32 bit Windows XPguest machine? I am running win XP guest machine on VMserver &Win2003 server host OS. After editing .vmx and starting the virtualmachine, both nw adapters are removed.
Thanks for the tip!
Also, by installing Intel Pro 1000 MT drivers, you can get VGTsupport in Windows! Just make sure it’s a 64bit OS. I am testing itnow, and I have verified it to work correctly. I just need to do somemore testing before I can verify and recommend it for productionenvironments!
As it looks now, it misses some pings to one network, but it’s probably due to a bad route.
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