Not knowing whether or not having both pcnet32 and vmxnet modules loaded, I found a work around that consistently shows only:
$ lsmod | egrep 'vm|pcnet' vmsync 3836 0 vmmemctl 7388 0 vmhgfs 33376 0 vmxnet 13696 0 I think this workaround is generally a wrong way of doing things, however, as it involves putting the pcnet32 module in the blackout list, meaning that when the vmxnet module won't load (after reboot on kernel upgrade), network connectivity will more than likely be lost completely. ... but it corrects the inconsistent behavior of either loading both pcnet32 and vmxnet, or loading only pcnet32 only. I added this line to: /etc/modprobe.d/blacklist: blacklist pcnet32 Then I reconfigured initramfs: dpkg-reconfigure linux-image-$(uname -r) then rebooted, and got the result above.
