My favorite helpers #1

Let's get our feets wet and dive into it.
I would like to show you the paap function edit vmx file from the Daily Administration group.

It's a very convenient way for the advanced VMware administrator to change the configuration of a virtual machine.

Consider this situation:
You want to change the virtual machine's ethernet adapter type but have to keep the current MAC address.

The vSphere Clients does not offer a way to change the type of an ethernet adapter as it does with the SCSI devices. You'll have to add an other one and remove the old adapter. After that the VM will use a newly generated MAC address. Thats the culprit and the moment when "edit vmx file" comes handy.

• Select VM in the vSphere Client 
• Go through the context menu: paap toolkit -> Daily Administration for Virtual Machines -> Edit VMX File 
• A new window with text editor will pop up:

• Find the entry ethernet0.virtualDev = "e1000"  in the editor.
• and change it to ethernet0.virtualDev = "vmxnet3"
• Look for further help on ethernet card types and their vmx entries with the "Help on NICs" button
  

• Save your changes
• Don't worry about malformed vmx files. The appliance will make a backup of the previous vmx file and revert to it if the hypervisor can't load the new configuration.

That's it. Power on the VM and enjoy the performance boost with vmxnet3.