“Device eth0 does not seem to be present” error when we move or clone a CentOS 6.3 virtual machine in vSphere

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When we move or clone a CentOS 6.3 Virtual machine made in vSphere5.5, and boot the machine once it is moved/cloned, we get the following error:

“Device eth0 does not seem to be present”.

This is due the fact that whenever we move or clone a Virtual machine, vSphere changes the MAC Address and CentOS renames the NIC from eth0 to eth1.  CentOS stores the network interface hardware configuration using udev.  The file is:

/etc/udev/rules.d/70-persistent-net.rules

Open this file in vi editor and delete the old entry for eth0 and edit the new entry for eth1 to eth0.
Then you need to edit the following file:

/etc/sysconfig/network-scripts/ifcfg-eth0

Record the HWADDR from the 70-persistent-net.rules configuration file and replace it with the existing HWADDR in ifcfg-eth0 configuration file.

Reboot the machine.
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