Get the intel drivers from e1000 NIC (32bit) and install them in your vm. Once installed make sure you configure the network card properties with the correct VLAN tag. Then make sure that you assign the VLAN tag 4095 to the virtual machine’s portgroup.

Once you have made network changes (802.1Q) and you have lost (oops) connectivity to your service console, use the following to change the VLAN tag: esxcfg-vswitch vSwitch0 -v N -p Service Console Where N is the VLAN tag you want to use. In this case it was vSwitch with the portgroup name Service Console. To list the current configuration use: esxcfg-vswitch -l

Use the following: esxcfg-vswitch -A "Port Group Name" vSwitch2 && esxcfg-vswitch -v N -p "Port Group Name" vSwitch2 Where N is the VLAN tag.

Log in over SSH and run: vmkfstools -c 50G -d thick /vmfs/volumes/san/vm/thick.vmdk vmkfstools -c 50G -d thin /vmfs/volumes/san/vm/thin.vmdk A ls will show: 50G thick-flat.vmdk 373 thick.vmdk 50G thin-flat.vmdk 398 thin.vmdk However a du will show: 50G thick-flat.vmdk 64K thick.vmdk 1.0M thin-flat.vmdk 64K thin.vmdk Which is, I think, rather neat…

If you want to enable promiscuous network sniffing within a vSwitch the safest way to do it is to create a second port group. Promiscuous mode can be enabled on an existing port group but once this has been done, any device connected to that port group has that ability. Once you have your second port group correctly configured you can attach a monitoring appliance. To do my monitoring I tend to use OpenBSD with tcpdump and then use Wireshark to analyse the data.