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Yesterday I had to port a Debian Guest OS from our old VMWare ESX Server to the new one. After using the VMWare Converter tool I had my Debian on the new machine. The OS started up as usual, except that it wasn't aware anymore of the device eth0.

When moving a Guest OS from one ESX to the other the automatical assigned MAC address changes and Debian remembers the state of device->physical address. When getting a new Mac address from the ESX server, Debian created a new network device eth1 instead of using the eth0.  As the guest operating system has a static network configuration, it couldn't connect anymore to the network.

To solve this problem, I had to change the MAC address in the file /etc/udev/rules.d/z25_persistent-net.rules in the Debian Guest OS.