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We've recently converted a physical Windows Server 2003 into vmware using P2V. However, one of the pieces of software on the 2003 machine are still looking for the old server's network MAC address in order to run. I've read several articles where it's discussed that you can modify the last part of the generated address and set it to static, but I need to clone the whole mac address to mimic the one in the old server. We're running CentOS and VMware server 2.0 as the host system. I was told that maybe adding in a second network card in the host and setting the virtual system's nic to that card instead of "bridged" would allow me to edit the vmx file and clone the whole MAC address. I can't use the old network card from the physical server because it's ISA and our new bus is PCI Any ideas? Thanks, Mike

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    Perhaps a silly question, but you are completely decommissioning the old server right? You won't want to copy the hardware address of the old box if you still will be using it at all.
    – Zoredache
    Nov 4, 2009 at 17:16

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VMWare will NOT let you change the VENDORID part of your generated MAC address. Well you can edit the VMX file but either the server won't boot or the NIC won't work - it's been about a year since i tried so i cant remember the failure behavior.

What you will need to do is spoof the mac address in windows I haven't done this in windows only *nix but a quick google led me to this link that seems pretty accurate (and since it claims to work in XP should be the same as 2k3) although a bit dated.

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