I have a mix of RHEL v5 and v6, both x32 and x86_64 in VMWare vCenter.

I've noticed just the other day that when I went to update VMWare Tools, that the NIC adapter isn't getting updated to say VMXNET 3, which is a newer adapter. I
have some VMs that are still on Flexible or E1000.

On a RHEL test VM, I was able to delete the Network Adapater, add a new one using VMXNET 3 and then I had to log into the RHEL VM and update the OS with the newer MAC Address and reboot to test.

I was wondering if others had experience with this or had any issues with this and if there was an automatic way to update the adapter without going thru all of this work.

thanks

The network adapter is defined as part of the virtual hardware. To change it, you have to change the "hardware". It's analogous to a NIC in a physical machine. The OS can't change a NIC from one type to another, you have to replace it.

I don't know of any tools available that automate it. It's technically possible with a combination of VMware PowerCLI to change the NICs and a script to change the configuration of the OS, but I've never tried automating it.

Talking with the VMWare Admin, in the Windows World, the driver for the NIC gets updated automatically, however in the Linux (RHEL) world, its a manual process to update this...

If I get the issue (and I may not fully) then I'd say that it is more of a Red Hat issue rather than linux as such. Red Hat and clones don't automatically change nic's like other distro's would let you. I run a debian usb flash drive on many different systems. It keeps changing the nic so far perfectly because of the way it was set up. Likewise you may have issues with other server types like OpenSuse/Suse. They may not automatically let you connect to the nic as the old nic was.

I talked to the VMWare admin today about this. He said on the windows side of the house, the NIC driver gets updated if VMWare pushed out a new version of VMWare Tools. VS Linux, or RHEL, where I'm running some older VMs and they have older NIC drivers that I will have to update manually by deleting the old NIC, creating a new NIC and making sure that new NIC is using the new driver (at this time it is VMXNET3), along with updating the MAC address.

Now the version of ESXi that we are on runs Linux OpenSUSE, however its a server and I don't think it runs VMWare Tools. We only run RHEL for Linux so I don't know how other distros would handle having a new version of VMWare Tools being pushed down to it and it if would update the NIC driver.