vSphere Ghost NICs

Only three days ago, I came across something I first considered to be a bug. It turned out it was normal behavior that I just haven’t seen, yet. So I figured it might be worth posting:

The summary tab of a VM showed two network port groups and I thought “Oops, that VM is supposed to be connected to single network only!” I looked into the Edit Settings windows which only showed a single network adapter. That confused me a bit to be honest!

I didn’t really figure it out until I asked my colleague Fabian Lenz who pointed me to snapshots: I turned out, the VM was connected to that other network with that ghost NIC. Then a snapshot was taken. After that, the NIC was replaced with an vmxnet3 adapter and connected to a different port group. With that vmxnet3 NIC connected to one network and the snapshot holding info on the long removed e1000 connected to another, the summary tab showed both connections!

Hope that helps you saving some time!