Every Ubuntu VM on ESXi gets one of two network cards: an emulated Intel card from the physical world, or VMware's own card designed for virtual machines. The choice is simpler than the forum wars suggest - once you know what each adapter actually is, and which old advice about drivers no longer applies.
Open the settings of an Ubuntu VM and the network adapter offers names like E1000E and VMXNET3. One pretends to be a real Intel network card so faithfully that any operating system believes it. The other admits it is virtual and talks to the hypervisor in the most efficient way possible. This page explains both in plain words, corrects an outdated driver belief that still circulates, grades the performance difference honestly, and shows how to switch a VM from one to the other without losing its network identity.
E1000E is an impersonation. ESXi presents a virtual copy of an Intel gigabit network card, and Ubuntu talks to it with the same driver it would use on physical hardware. Compatibility is total - installers, recovery environments and ancient systems all recognise it.
VMXNET3 drops the disguise. It is a network device designed by VMware purely for virtual machines: no pretend hardware registers, just an efficient channel between guest and hypervisor. Because it does no impersonation work, it moves packets with less host CPU, supports modern offloads, and presents a 10 Gb-class link to the guest regardless of the paperwork the emulated card is bound by.
One-line summary: E1000E exists so that everything works; VMXNET3 exists so that it works efficiently.
Old guides warn that VMXNET3 "needs VMware Tools installed before the network works". That was true in the era when the driver shipped only with the tools. Modern Ubuntu carries the VMXNET3 driver inside the Linux kernel itself, so a current Ubuntu VM on VMXNET3 has networking during installation and on first boot, tools or no tools.
Install open-vm-tools anyway - for guest information, graceful shutdown and quiesced snapshots, as the tools guide in this series explains. But if a VMXNET3 Ubuntu VM has no network today, the cause is almost never the driver; the troubleshooting section below lists the real suspects. You can confirm the driver is loaded inside Ubuntu with lsmod | grep vmxnet3 and see the card itself with lspci | grep -i ethernet.
On a typical home or small-office host with a 1 Gb physical network, you will not feel a difference between the two adapters: the physical wire is the bottleneck for both, and the emulated card reaches gigabit speeds on any modern CPU.
VMXNET3 pulls ahead where traffic is heavy or fast: hosts with 10 Gb uplinks, VMs that talk mostly to each other on the same host, and busy servers where the CPU saved per packet adds up across thousands of packets a second. It is the professional default for production Linux VMs for good reason.
And the label honesty: a VMXNET3 link reporting 10 Gbps does not give you 10 Gbps internet. Your real speed is still the slowest physical link on the path. The number describes the virtual card's class, not a promise.
Changing adapter type gives the VM a new virtual card - and with it, a new MAC address. Plan for that and the swap is boring:
ip a shows the interface with an address; lspci | grep -i ethernet shows the VMware adapterHot-adding a second adapter while the VM runs also works and lets you verify the new path before removing the old one - the cautious route for a VM you cannot casually power off.
When an Ubuntu VM has no network, check in this order before touching drivers:
ip a - an interface present but address-less points at DHCP or netplan, not ESXilspci shows the card while no interface exists. Switch to E1000E to get online, update fully, then switch back if you want VMXNET3The full process on a live ESXi host - creating the virtual machine, installing Ubuntu and fixing the common problems, exactly as they appear on screen.
Watch Full VideoNo. VMXNET3 presents a 10 Gb-class virtual link, which means the virtual card itself does not cap you at 1 Gbps - very useful between VMs on the same host and on hosts with fast uplinks. Your actual speed is still decided by the slowest physical link on the path: a 1 Gb switch or a home internet connection remains exactly that.
You can hot-add a new VMXNET3 adapter while the VM runs, verify it works, and then remove the old one - the safe route for a machine you cannot power off. Simply editing the existing adapter's type is a power-off change. Either way, expect a new MAC address, so update DHCP reservations and check netplan afterwards.
Almost certainly not - current Ubuntu releases carry the VMXNET3 driver in the kernel, which you can confirm with lspci and lsmod inside the guest. Work the boring list first: adapter connected, correct VM network, an address actually assigned, and netplan not still pinned to the old adapter's MAC or interface name.