I moved a VMWare client (using the VMWare vCenter Converter) from a VMWare Workstation 7 host to an ESX V3.5 host. Everything seems to have gone correctly but when I power on the VMWare image the network devices don't load. I have tried removing the network device and re-adding it but always get the same results.
If I perform an lshw -C network it shows the that the networking is disabled.
It turns out that the network adapter was showing up as eth2 instead of eth0 (which in hindsight makes sense). I changed eth0 to eth2 in the /etc/interfaces file and it worked right away.
You can also modify the following file...
/etc/udev/rules.d/70-persistent-net.rules
If you want to make the "new" network adapter eth0.
So say you have entries for eth0, eth1, and eth2. eth0 and eth1 were nics on the server before migration. eth2 is the current nic.
You would delete the lines for eth0 and eth1, and then change the entry for eth2 to eth0.
Restart the machine and it would then work as eth0.
Have you installed the ESX version of VMWare tools? If you do an
ls mod
do you see the pcnet32 or vmxnet modules loaded?