Once booted from local disk (without going through the network), you can do whatever you want with the NIC.

The process to convert from vDisk to local disk is sometimes called Reverse Imaging. To update network stack-affecting software, you must first convert (clone) the Provisioning Services vDisk to a traditional virtual machine local disk. In this case, create a new maintenance version of your vDisk, boot it, and run the new Provisioning Services target device installer to do an in-place upgrade. Provisioning Services Target Device Software for Windows - If the Provisioning Services Target Device Software for Windows is version 7.6.1 or newer, then reverse imaging is no longer needed to update the Provisioning Services Target Device Software.VMware Tools, XenServer Tools, VirtIO, etc.)

The following provides a list of known network affecting software that periodically requires updating, this is not necessarily a complete list: When a Provisioning Services Target Device for Windows is booted from Provisioning Services (across the network), it is not possible to perform any software updates that affect the network stack, since the network stack changes will drop the connection to the vDisk.

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