vMotion of NSX VMs may display error: "Virtual ethernet card Network adapter 1 is not supported"

Products

• VMware NSX Networking

Issue/Introduction

Symptoms:

Migration of NSX VMs may display error:

Virtual ethernet card Network adapter 1 is not supported.

Environment

VMware NSX Transformers 2.x
VMware NSX for Multi-Hypervisor

Cause

NSX VMs guestOS type is "otherLinux64"(as it is a custom OS that is the right type). And vmxnet3 is the network driver.

VMXNET 3 is supported only for virtual machines version 7 and later, with a limited set of guest operating systems:

• 32- and 64-bit versions of Microsoft Windows 7, XP, 2003, 2003 R2, 2008, 2008 R2, and Server 2012
• 32- and 64-bit versions of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.0 and later
• 32- and 64-bit versions of SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 10 and later
• 32- and 64-bit versions of Asianux 3 and later
• 32- and 64-bit versions of Debian 4
• 32- and 64-bit versions of Ubuntu 7.04 and later
• 32- and 64-bit versions of Sun Solaris 10 and later""

Now that NSX VMs guestOS is "otherLinux64" and of none of the standard types, the vCenter Server thinks that the VNIC is not compatible with this VM and accordingly throws the warning.

Resolution

This error is benign and can be safely ignored. Networking will work correctly after vMotion.