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hutchingsp
Enthusiast
Enthusiast
‎03-28-2008 08:25 AM

Flexible NIC vs. Enhanced Vmxnet?!

I cold migrated a VM from a 3.02 ESX box to a 3.5 host. The VM was running CentOS 5.0.

I had some difficulties getting networking to work, and perhaps in a bit of a hurry I removed the default VNIC and added a new one.

I've noticed the default NICs on that (and all other) VM was set to "Flexible" and was called "Network Adaptor 1".

The new (and sole) NIC is called "Virtual Ethernet Adaptor" and I was given a choice of e1000 or enhanced vmxnet. I chose the latter and everything appears to be working, but I don't understand the differences between flexible, e1000, and enhanced, and why I don't seem to have flexible as a choice any longer etc.

Thanks in advance.

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1 Reply
demz
Expert
Expert
‎03-28-2008 08:37 AM

Hi,

Enhanced vmxnet is the new network driver introduced by 3.5.

It brings some enhancements as VMware stated :

Enhanced VMXNET-Enhanced VMXNET is the next version of VMware's paravirtulized virtual networking device for guest operating systems. Enhanced VMXNET includes several new networking I/O performance improvements including support for TCP/IP Segmentation Offload (TSO) and jumbo frames. Additionally, Enhanced VMXNET includes support for both 32-bit and 64-bit guests.

Enhanced VMXNET is supported only for a limited set of guest operating systems:

  • 32/64-bit versions of Microsoft Windows 2003 (Enterprise and Datacenter Editions)

  • 32/64-bit versions Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.0

  • 32/64-bit versions SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 10

  • 64-bit versions Red Hat Enterprise Linux 4.0

Hope this helps.

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