It may become necessary at some point to change the management IP of your VMware / ESX server which is refered to as the service console. To do this it requires two basic commands from the ESX console.
First you must delete the existing vswif0 with the following command:
esxcfg-vswif -d vswif0
ignore the message "nothing to flush"
Then enter the following command to configure the new IP address, using your own IP.
esxcfg-vswif -a vswif0 -p Service\ Console -i 172.16.1.1 255.255.255.0 -b 172.16.1.255
Thats it!
