Henry Aloni's questions

I am developing NICs and NIC drivers. My NICs have very distinct behavior : they have custom data rate (10/100/1000/10000/14000/18000), and they have their own drivers.

I would like to do QoS tests, for various OSes. For that I am thinking about the following setup: An ESXi 5 host server with two NICs - one for console (which is a default 10/100 NIC), and a second NIC - the one I am developing - which is connected to another physical computer.

Is there a way to define the second NIC such that all guest OSes will see the NIC as if it was the physical NIC?

I am using VMWare ESXi 5.
The ESXi 5 host has a NIC with the MAC XXXX:XXXX:XXXX
I have created a console port for that card.
I have added a new guest named COMP and manually assigned the MAC address of the physical NIC (XXXX:XXXX:XXXX - same as the NIC of the ESXi server).
Now COMP reports it has a NIC with IP Y.Y.Y.Y, same IP in VMWare port definition.

COMP will not respond to pings.

When I logged in to the ESXi host via SSH and tried to ping other computers connected to it, COMP responded to pings for the rest of the day. After a pingless night (or no communication to COMP) - COMP returned to the point of not responding to pings again.

1. What's happening there?
2. IS there a way to resolve this issue such that COMP will always respond to pings?

Here are the full details: I am trying to test driver setup of a NIC I personally develop.

Up until now I had to install a new machine for the test. Lately I encountered VMware, and I thought it can be set up to virtualize a machine such that it's NIC behaves just like the physical NIC of the virtual machine.

This question led me to believe this setup was possible: Can't ping host from vmware guest using bridged networking.