In Esxi Mac Address Manual Vs. Automatic Best Practice

  1. In Esxi Mac Address Manual Vs. Automatic Best Practice Test
  2. In Esxi Mac Address Manual Vs. Automatic Best Practices
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Assign a Static MAC Address with the vSphere Web Client. You can assign static MAC addresses to a powered-down virtual machine's virtual NICs. In the MAC Address section, select Manual from the drop-down menu. Type the static MAC address and click OK. The following examples show when you might set a static MAC address. Virtual network adapters on different physical hosts share the same subnet and are assigned the same MAC address, causing a conflict. Because ESXi virtual machines do not support arbitrary MAC addresses, you must use the example format. Jul 20, 2016  How to set a static MAC address in VMware Environment? How to avoid MAC address conflicts with multiple vCenters. Assigned by ESXi host; Manual – in this case you can define the value of the MAC. A new MAC address for the virtual network adapter of your VMs by configuring the virtual network adapter to use a Manual MAC address,.

VMware Workstation 9, VMware ESXi 5.1, Windows 7 x64 VMNo vCenter access, but I could deploy a vCVA if need be.

I am able to move the VM from Workstation to ESXi just fine. Using the VM->Manage->Upload option, didn't try scp or similar yet.

In Esxi Mac Address Manual Vs. Automatic Best Practice Test

My challenge is that I need to preserve the UUID, MAC address, and any other information that is unique to the source VM.

Manual

Once I upload the VM to ESXi a customization is automatically happening assigning a new MAC address, UUID, etc., how can I avoid that from happening?

I need the VM on ESXi to be exactly the way it was on Workstation. I know that I can manually set the MAC on ESXi, but that doesn't prevent whatever other customizations are happening.

UPDATE:joeqwerty's comment about the UUID was good, however I was unable to change the MAC address to what it needed to be. On Workstation it's 00:0C:29:63:3E:BA, when I try to set a manual address in ESXi it suggests the first 6 to be 00:50:56: when I enter the Workstation address instead I receive the following error message:

Failed to start the virtual machine.Module DevicePowerOn power on failed.Could not set up 'macAddress' for ethernet0.Invalid MAC address specified. 00:0C:29:63:3E:BA is not an allowed static Ethernet address.It conflicts with VMware reserved MACs.

This is an issue with an unpatched 5.1 install and has been fixed in 5.1 U2, and 5.5, see http://kb.vmware.com/selfservice/microsites/search.do?language=en_US&cmd=displayKC&externalId=2035707

UPDATE 2:Even though the above link states that this issue has been resolved in 5.5 it has not actually been resolved and the MAC address restriction still shows up until one manually edits the vmx file to disable the MAC address check as explained in the above link.

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In Esxi Mac Address Manual Vs. Automatic Best Practices

1 Answer

You can manually assign a MAC address (as you've stated) and you can manually specify the UUID by editing the .vmx file of the VM.

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