vmware gigabit nic support

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A colleague at work the other day was wondering how to get vmware to support a gigabit nic in a linux guest os.

I did some scratching around, and found this. An obscure reference in the vmware forums.

Long story short, put this in the vm's .vmx file. Of course, adjust as needed depending on the NIC you want to be gigabit.

ethernet0.virtualDev = e1000

Then you can configure your linux guest vm to use the intel e1000 driver instead of the pcnet32.

I know it works in vmware workstation 5.5. Not sure about vmware server, as I have yet to test it there.