Last week I planned to migrate some virtual machines running on a VMWare Server 1.x Windows host to aVMWare ESX 3.5i host.
One of the vm’s is running as license server and the registration key was registered by using the MAC of the network interface. I had to keep the MAC address of this VM. I first read this post.
I tried to manually set the MAC address from VMWare client but go the following message:

Then I removed the vm from ESX inventory; download the vmx file and changed the ethernet0.addressType to static. I used Notepad+ to change ethernet0.Address = “01:0C:29:B0:27:E1″ value. I deleted original file from the Datastore and upload the vmx file back. I started the vm again and got the message below:

Without an additional setting in the vmx config file you won’t be able to assign a static MAC address in the range your require. To disable mac address checking before boot add the following line in the vmx file.
Thanks to Jason Nash I fixed my problem. http://jasonnash.wordpress.com/2008/08/30/disabling-mac-address-checking-in-vmware/
My working config changes:

Radek
VMWare ESX 3.5i U4
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Error
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00:0E:2E:0C:07:8F is not an allowed static Ethernet address.
Invalid MAC address specified.
Failed to configure ethernet1.
Ivan Versluis
ethernet0.present = “true”
ethernet0.networkName = “vlan1″
ethernet0.checkMACAddress = “false”
ethernet0.addressType = “static”
ethernet0.Address = “00:0C:29:B0:27:E1″
This is the config I used for the NIC interface. Please check on your end.
guy
so i’ve esx 3.5 U4. this solution is not working.
Ivan Versluis
Well I got this solution working when migrating the VMWare Server virtual machine to ESX i.
Please make sure that you:
Remove virtual machine from inventory
Download the vmx file from datastore to local drive
Delete vmx file from datastore
Edit the vmx file with Notepad++ with configuration settings above
Upload the new vmx file to datastore
Register the vmx file with ESX server
Philipp
Thank you for this info.
I can confirm it works with ESX 3.5.0 Build 153875.
chukaman
Awesome this rocks. Working happily on ESX 3.5.0 Build 153875 for me as well. I barely obeyed your instructions, but what I needed was:
ethernet0.checkMACAddress = “false”
Thanks
Tim Nordloh
I found this same error manifested when the filesystem got full, due to a vmware.log. Anyone know how to disable this logfile?
Reza Toghraee
Perfect man, Thanks so MUCH.!!
Kris
is anyone tried to change the MAC from “00:50:56:00:00:00-00:50:56:3F:FF:FF” range as static for VMXnet 3 type NIC?
mea_john
Solution is working on ESX 4.1u1
Nguyen Viet Anh
place file vmx in VMware ESXi 4.1