Setting a Static MAC Address to a Virtual Machine

In most network deployments, generated MAC addresses are a good approach. However, you might need to set a static MAC address for a virtual machine adapter with unique value.

The following cases show when you might set a static MAC address:

• Virtual machine adapters on different physical hosts share the same subnet and are assigned the same MAC address, causing a conflict.
• Ensure that a virtual machine adapter always has the same MAC address.

By default, VMware uses the Organizationally Unique Identifier (OUI) 00:50:56 for manually generated addresses, but all unique manually generated addresses are supported.

Note: Make sure that no other non-VMware devices use addresses assigned to VMware components. For example, you might have physical servers in the same subnet, which use 11:11:11:11:11:11, 22:22:22:22:22:22 as static MAC addresses. The physical servers do not belong to the vCenter Server inventory, and vCenter Server is not able to check for address collision.