Bridge device assignments unreliable if two identical NICs are installed on a windows host.

[yuriks]

I have two identical (same chipset and same driver) ethernet NICs installed in a Windows 7 SP1 host. They appear on the device manager as two devices with identical names. I'd like to bridge each to a different virtual interface in a Linux guest. Unfortunately, the VirtualBox machine configuration files identify interfaces in bridging configurations only by their name, leading to an ambiguity in this case (since both devices are identical) and resulting in the two devices being randomly re-assigned to a different virtual guest interface every time.

A more precise way of specifying host network devices needs to be used, perhaps mac address or the windows UUID.

[yuriks]

VBox log

[yuriks]

VM description file

[Klaus Espenlaub]

Never seen such problems with two devices having exactly the same name. For all my Windows installs they were made unique by appending a number, and IIRC renaming also checked for clashes with other network devices.