vCenter attach_nic action throws parsing error

[onenhansen]

Description
For vCenter 8 Cluster VM's when attaching a NIC the following error is thrown in the logs:

Cannot attach NIC to VM: InvalidRequest:
Cannot parse "11030938062" as an int value
while parsing serialized value of type int
at line 1, column 405
while parsing property "key" of static type int
while parsing serialized DataObject of type vim.vm.device.VirtualVmxnet3
at line 1, column 371
....

To Reproduce
Try to attach a new NIC to a virtual machine imported from or instantiated on a vCenter 8 Cluster

Expected behavior
The request should be accepted and processed resulting in a new NIC attached to the VM

Details

• Affected Component: VMM/vCenter
• Hypervisor: vCenter 8
• Version: 6.8

Progress Status

• Code committed
• Testing - QA
• Documentation (Release notes - resolved issues, compatibility, known issues)

[onenhansen]

This was caused by the key attribute being generated with a timestamp but vCenter expects a signed 32-bit integer. This is now -100 - NUM_DEVICES.