I was building out my virtualized lab and instead of re-installing ESXi over and over again I figured I would just quickly clone them. Now of course this leads to a “minor” problem as the virtualized ESXi hosts will all boot with the same IP-Address. As I don’t have DHCP to my disposal I needed to change them manually, so how do you change the IP address of ESXi through the commandline?

It is actually pretty straight forward with esxcli these days. First thing I did was listing all VMkernel NICs:

esxcli network ip interface ipv4 get

This will give you the list of all VMkernel interfaces with their details (See screenshot below). Changing the IP address is just a matter of adding some parameters:

esxcli network ip interface ipv4 set -i vmk1 -I 10.27.51.143 -N 255.255.255.0 -t static

In your situation you will need to replace “vmk1” with the appropriate VMkernel NIC of course and change the IP details.