Connectivity issues when setting guest MAC to the same as the host MAC on ESXi 5

  1. A MAC address conflict is what's happening. Since you have two objects with the same MAC address, packets bound for either device will end up at one or the other, and where you "intend" for them to go doesn't matter a whole lot.

  2. Don't assign the same MAC address to your "COMP" as you have for your VMWare server. MAC addresses should be unique, when you have duplicates on your network things like this happen.


To address your most recent content update, if you want to "pass" the physical NIC through to the guest. This article describes it for ESXi 4 and this article walks you through it for ESXi 5. You use DirectPath I/O to present the physical NIC directly to the guest. When you do this, the host will not use that NIC at all.

The way you're trying to do it now is just basically causing you to arp poison yourself.