You can configure the settings for the virtual machine's virtual network adapter. These settings include the virtual network adapter to which the virtual machine is bound and the network driver it uses.
You can select a vmnic adapter, which connects the virtual machine to the physical network adapter, allowing the virtual machine to look and act as another computer on the network. Alternately, you can select a vmnet adapter and connect the virtual machine to an internal network of other virtual machines. All the virtual machines on this computer connected to a particular vmnet are on the same network. Your third choice is to select bond, that binds this virtual machine to a team of physical NICs on the server.
You must select the network driver for each network connection. You can choose between the vlance driver, which installs automatically, and the vmxnet driver, which provides better network performance. The difference in network performance is most noticeable if the virtual machine is connected to a Gigabit Ethernet card.
If you use vmxnet in a Windows or Linux virtual machine, the virtual network device is not visible to the guest operating system until you install VMware Tools (see www.vmware.com/support/esx2/doc/esx20admin_tools_vms.html).
After the virtual machine is created, you can use this page to assign additional network adapters to the virtual machine.
If you need help determining which network adapter is associated with a particular device name, you can use the service console's findnic command.
For more details about VMware ESX Server networking options, go to www.vmware.com/support/esx2/doc/esx20admin_netwk.html.
To configure an existing virtual network adapter, complete the following steps.
To add a new virtual network adapter to a virtual machine, make sure the virtual machine is powered off, then complete the following steps.