NSX Mystery: The vMAC treasure hunt

Being a fan of cryptography and the fact that I have spent a lot of time (around the age of 15 or so) playing online hacking games, made me never look at things the way they are and I do avidly try to look at things from different angles.

As I am currently revisiting all things NSX in preparation of my VCDX-NV redefense, I kind of stumbled on the topic of vMAC and the fact that the vMAC value is always “02:50:56:56:44:52“.

So I thought to myself, why? Why is this vMAC used? Why not another MAC address? Why Mr. Anderson? Why :-P? So, knowing that the MAC address is always written in HEX format and the IP is written in decimal format I brought my trusted ASCII table (Credit Wikipedia):

And started to match values:

02 -> Start of text

50: P

56: V

56: V

44: D

52: R

So it says “PVVDR” *MOUAHAHA* lol! Well yeah it did have this laugh when I first saw it to be honest! Its pretty cool actually, so what we do know is that when we issue the command “net-vdr -C -l” on an ESXi host we would have a listing with connection information and the property of this is called vdr-port and sometimes referred to as Logical Router Port.

Back to the finding, I get that VDR should be Virtual Distributed Router but on the other hand we still have the PV which I suspect is referring to Physical to Virtual and thus we’d have “Physical Virtual Virtual Distributed Router“.

This is meant to be a purely geeky post, with a topping of OCD for that matter :-P. I am glad that the vMAC interpretation meant something and it was not chosen aimlessly, I really do!

(Abdullah)^2