Physical Network Adapter (pnic)

The term pnic refers to the physical network adapters as seen by the primary operating system. When using the vSphere Web Services SDK, you can manipulate the adapter directly. When using the vSphere Client GUI, you manipulate instead the uplink adapter. On an ESXi host, each pnic has one associated uplink adapter.

In a vDS environment, you use a DVS uplink instead of an uplink adapter.