Well, it’s another day another fight. As we started migrating our VM’s from the old VMware ESX farms to the new environment, and upgraded the hardware suddenly the network devices were hot-plug-able, thus they did turn up in the “Safely Remove” dialog.

I myself don’t have any trouble with that. The trouble I do have is the people working with those VM’s and their possibly hazardous “uuuh, what’s this ? I don’t need this! <click-click, network-device unplugged>”

So I went googling (why isn’t that a dictionary term by now ?) and found something. Simple solution is to disable the hot plugging of hardware in the VM’s settings.