Support for VMXNET3 in CA PAM

Products

• CA Privileged Access Manager (PAM)

Issue/Introduction

When a CA PAM OVA is deployed, E1000 is automatically chosen as the NIC to be deployed in the virtual machine

However VMWARE recommends for a while to use the newer VMXNET3 virtual NIC

The question poses whether VMXNET3 is supported in PAM and how to replace the E1000 adapter

Environment

CA PAM up to version 4.1.5

Resolution

That should work. Even if there is no formal testing done, there have been a number of installations with VMXNET3 adapter and there has never been a problem reported for them

In terms of how this should set up, one easy way to do it is- before the CA PAM OVA is deployed- to delete the existing E1000 adapter and add the new VMXNET3 one, then switch on PAM and complete the network details in the initial screen in the VMWARE console.

It is interesting to do the replacement before the actual CA PAM ova is started and licensed, because license is tied to different hardware parameters, including the MAC Address, and of course replacing the adapter will most times cause its MAC address to change, resulting in problems picking up the existing license. If one wishes to change the adapter from E1000 to VMXNET3 without changing its MAC and without having t delete and recreate the adapter, there is a command to do that:

Get-VM "vmname" | get-networkAdapter | Where { $_.Type -eq "E1000"} | set-NetworkAdapter -Type "vmxnet3" -NetworkName "Network Adapter 1"

The details about this command be found here:

https://developer.vmware.com/powercli