vmnic

For ages I have been pondering over ‘something’ which seems very trivial and the fact I can’t get any solid info on it is driving me nuts: Why does every pNIC also have a virtual MAC address? So here with have the VMkernel ports, a VSS and pNICS: Just as you would expect, every physical NIC (pNIC) on a host has a MAC address. BUT when you type ‘esxcfg-info -n‘ in the shell, you will notice that every vmnic also has a Virtual MAC Address!   \==+Physical Nic : |—-Name…………………………………………..vmnic3 |—-PCI Segment…………………………………….0 |—-PCI Bus………………………………………..2 |—-PCI Slot……………………………………….0 |—-PCI function……………………………………1 |—-MAC Address…………………………………….XX:XX:XX:32:06:1f |—-Virtual MAC Address……………………………..00:50:56:52:06:1f |—-FPT Shareable………………………………..true Now as you can see the Virtual MAC Address starts off with a VMware MAC and then finishes at the […]