Windows – View hidden network interface IP address

Was troubleshooting something in VMware, I ended up copying the actual files of a VM from one datastore to another and re-adding it to a host (because the original host was stuck entering into maintenance mode and I needed this VM to sort that out blah blah … doesn’t matter!). Problem is when I did the re-adding and vCenter asked me if I copied or moved the VM, I said I copied. This resulted in all the network interfaces getting new MAC addresses (among other changes) and suddenly my VM was without any of the previously configured static IPs!

Damn.

The old interfaces are still there just that they are hidden.

I used PowerShell/ WMI to list all the network interfaces on the server (this shows the hidden ones too).

In the Network Connections GUI all I can see are the last two adapters, so everything else is hidden. If I just wanted to delete them I would have followed the instructions in this post. (When following the instructions in that post be sure to enter set devmgr_show_nonpresent_devices=1 on a line of its own).

The ones starting with “vmxnet3” are what’s of interest for me so let’s focus on that. 

The reason I focused on SettingID is because if you check under HKLM\SYSTEM\ControlSet001\services\Tcpip\Parameters\Interfaces you’ll find entries with these GUIDs.

With a bit of PowerShell you can enumerate these keys and the IP address assigned to it:

My PowerShell skills are getting worse by the day due to disuse so the above is not probably the most elegant way of doing this. :)

Anyways, by comparing the two outputs I was able to identify the missing IP as either 10.136.37.36 or 10.134.203.2. The latter was of a different network so it looked like an older hidden adapter. I set the former, and as expected the network started working. Yay!