On VMware Fusion 5.x try:
ethernet0.virtualDev = "vmxnet3"
to get rid of errors in ifconfig.
I switched to VMXNET3 from an old PCnet32- LANCE (I guess that was a remaining setting of VMware Fusion 3.x) and now my Ubuntu 12.04 32-bit guest works like a charm. This is the ouput of lshw:
$ sudo lshw | grep -B 13 -A 1 vmxnet
*-network
description: Ethernet interface
product: VMXNET3 Ethernet Controller
vendor: VMware
physical id: 0
bus info: pci@0000:03:00.0
logical name: eth0
version: 01
serial: 00:0c:29:a4:b0:81
capacity: 1Gbit/s
width: 32 bits
clock: 33MHz
capabilities: pm pciexpress msi msix bus_master cap_list rom ethernet physical logical tp 1000bt-fd
configuration: autonegotiation=off broadcast=yes driver=vmxnet3 driverversion=1.1.29.0-k-NAPI duplex=full firmware=N/A ip=172.16.54.252 latency=0 link=yes multicast=yes port=twisted pair
resources: irq:18 memory:ca404000-ca404fff memory:ca403000-ca403fff memory:ca400000-ca401fff ioport:4000(size=16) memory:d8a00000-d8a0ffff
This article VMware KB: Choosing a network adapter for your virtual machine provides more information on VMXNET3:
VMXNET 3: The VMXNET 3 adapter is the next generation of a paravirtualized NIC designed for performance, and is not related to VMXNET or VMXNET 2. It offers all the features available in VMXNET 2, and adds several new features like multiqueue support (also known as Receive Side Scaling in Windows), IPv6 offloads, and MSI/MSI-X interrupt delivery.
VMXNET 3 is supported only for virtual machines version 7 and later, with a limited set of guest operating systems:
- 32- and 64-bit versions of Microsoft Windows 7, XP, 2003, 2003 R2, 2008, 2008 R2, and Server 2012
- 32- and 64-bit versions of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.0 and later
- 32- and 64-bit versions of SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 10 and later
- 32- and 64-bit versions of Asianux 3 and later
- 32- and 64-bit versions of Debian 4
- 32- and 64-bit versions of Ubuntu 7.04 and later
- 32- and 64-bit versions of Sun Solaris 10 and later