TuQuoc.orgPorting a Debian Guest OS from a VMWare Machine to another
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.