ESXi and vCenter Server 5.1 Documentation > vSphere Virtual Machine Administration > Configure Virtual Machine Hardware in the vSphere Web Client > Networking

Network adapter type

When configuring a virtual machine, you can add network adapters (NICs) and specify the adapter type.

Which network adapter types can be used depends on the following factors:

■	The virtual machine version (based on the host that created it or most recently updated it).
■	Whether the virtual machine has been updated to the latest version of the current host.
■	Guest operating system.

The following network card types are supported:

E1000	An emulated version of the Intel 82545EM Gigabit Ethernet NIC with drivers available in most newer guest operating systems, including Windows XP and later and Linux version 2.4.19 and later.
variable	When a virtual machine boots, it identifies itself as a Vlance adapter, but can initialize itself as a Vlance or VMXNET adapter and function accordingly, depending on the driver that initialized it. After VMware Tools is installed, the VMXNET driver changes the Vlance adapter to the higher performance VMXNET adapter.
Vlance	An emulated version of the AMD 79C970 PCnet32 LANCE NIC, an older 10 Mbps NIC with drivers available in most 32-bit guest operating systems (except Windows Vista and later). Virtual machines configured with this network adapter can use their network immediately.
VMXNET	Optimized for greater performance in virtual machines and has no physical copies. Because the operating system vendor does not provide built-in drivers for this card, you must install VMware Tools to provide a usable driver for the VMXNET network adapter.
VMXNET 2 (Enhanced)	Based on the VMXNET adapter, but provides higher performance features commonly used in modern networks, such as jumbo frames and hardware offload. VMXNET 2 (enhanced) is only available for select guest operating systems on ESX/ESXi 3.5 and later hosts.
VMXNET 3	The next generation of paravirtualized NICs, built for high performance. VMXNET 3 provides all the features available in VMXNET 2, plus several new features such as multi-queue support (also known as receiver-side scaling in Windows), IPv6 offload, and MSI/MSI-X interrupt delivery. VMXNET 3 is not related to VMXNET or VMXNET 2.   http://pubs.vmware.com/vsphere-51/index.jsp?topic=%2Fcom.vmware.vsphere.vm_admin.doc%2FGUID-AF9E24A8-2CFA-447B-AC83-35D563119667.html