VMWare VMNIC numbering issue

[cah]

After equipment move and all the network reconfiguration, Cisco UCS equipment finally came back on line.

The C240 came up fine but the C460 became noncompliant to host profile.
After taking a look, it was complaining about vmnic5 is unavailable. I logged into ESXi host and found it has become vmnic6!?

I opened a ticket with VMWare but went into ESXi and checked deeper.
I found /etc/vmware/esx.conf has vmnic information in it.
For sure, I saw vmnic6 with the same MAC address as the old vmnic5.
So I changed it from vmnic6 to vmnic5 and did another reboot.

After the reboot, it came back and the vmnic6 has become vmnic5!
I applied the host profile and it is now compliant!!