Since a long time VMware supports device hot plug in its Virtual Machines. This leads to the "Safely Remove Hardware and Eject Media" tray icon to be displayed in Windows VMs, and it allows a user to eject the network card and even hard disks from the machine. While the latter will fail in most cases, because the hard disk is in use by Windows, ejecting the NIC will succeed ... and it will do exactly this. The NIC will disappear from the VM, which will disconnect from the network until a VMware administrator re-adds a new NIC to it!
How many times were curious Windows Admins or VDI desktop users not only tempted by this possibility, but even used it - only to find themselves disconnected from their machines with no way to re-connect ;-) ?! The first few times this may be funny, but then you will want to look for ways to prevent this.
Google is you friend, and you will easily find many different ways to address this issue, but scattered across even more blogs and sites. This is my attempt to collect all of them in one blog post.
