When running Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 virtualised in VMware ESXi, using the recommended vmxnet3 NIC driver, why do I see the network interrupted periodically?

Issue

With Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 installed as guests, running with VMware ESXi 5 as the Hypervisor, vmware-tools will provide a VMware supplied vmxnet3 network driver. If the guest has a lot of UDP traffic, mostly consisting of small packets, the driver will attempt to adjust the ring buffers. This action will have a corresponding response from ESXi where the NIC is disconnected and reconnected again, resulting in some milliseconds interruption of network traffic (20-50 milliseconds).