• Automatic Update to the Latest Version of VMware Tools 30. Workstation User’s Manual 6 VMware, Inc. Maintaining and Changing the MAC Address of a Virtual.
• Change the MAC Address for a Virtual Machine in VMware Workstation 1. Prepare - My PC: A host operating system installed VMware Workstation Pro version 15.5.

1. Vmware Automatic Vs Manual Mac Address Free
2. Vmware Automatic Vs Manual Mac Address 1
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Vmware Automatic Vs Manual Mac Address Free

Aug 12, 2013  Unfortunately you cannot just edit an automatically generated MAC address, because the ranges for manually and automatically generated MAC addresses are different and enforced by VMware. If you want to ensure a MAC address remains the same at all times even if you switch virtual network adapters, you may assign a static MAC address to the VM.

When you create a VM on VMware ESXi, each network interface of the VM is assigned a dynamically generated MAC address. If you want to change this default behavior and assign a static MAC address to your VM, here is how to do it.

As you can see above, VMware's vSphere GUI client already has a menu for setting a static MAC address for a VM. However, this GUI-based method only allows you to choose a static MAC address from 00:50:56:xx:xx:xx, which is VMware-reserved MAC address range. If you attempt to set any arbitrary MAC address outside this MAC range, you will fail to launch the VM, and get the following error.

Then what if I want to assign any arbitrary MAC address to a VM?

Vmware Automatic Vs Manual Mac Address 1

Fortunately, there is a workaround to this limitation. The solution is, instead of using vSphere GUI client, editing .vmx file of your VM directly, after logging in to the ESXi host.

First, turn off the VM to which you want to assign a static MAC address.

Enable SSH access to your ESXi host if you haven't done it already. Then log in to the ESXi host via SSH.

Move to the directory where your VM's .vmx file is located:

Open .vmx file with a text editor, and add the following fields. Replace the MAC address field with your own.

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Now you should be able to launch a VM with the static MAC address you defined in .vmx file.

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I have some software running on a Windows virtual machine. I am using VMWare as the virtualization technology. The problem comes in with the software's activation / registration. The company who created the software is using the machine's MAC address to uniquely identify the machine during the process.

Whenever I reboot the VM image I get a new dynamic MAC address, which then causes the software to de-activate itself. Is there a way I can setup the VM image so that it will always use the same static MAC address?

2 Answers

Short answer that glosses over the details; VMware will usually provide a unique MAC address for a VM on a network. It will usually provide the same MAC address to a VM so long as the VM is not moved between hosts. In circumstances where this a changing mac address is a problem, you can manually set one.

To manually assign an address, edit the config file for the VM;Remove

and add

XX must be a valid hexadecimal number between 00h and 3Fh, and YY and ZZ must be valid hexadecimal numbers between 00h and FFh

This is how it's done with Server, Workstation, and GSX (and I presume Fusion) The basics are the same for ESX, but what mac addresses you can use are different.

For more, search the VMware knowledge base for the articles

'Setting a static MAC address for a virtual NIC', 'Changing the MAC Address of a virtual Machine' and other articles with 'MAC Address' in their title.

Yes, but you have to edit the VM's config file directly via the COS, with the VM shutdown too (I think).

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