"device eth0 does not seem to be present, delaying initialization" Error CentOS 6.2 + VMware Clone

CentOS 6.2 Cloned VM are having this issue 

# ls /sys/class/net
eth1 lo

There is a device manager, udev, which stores the settings from the NIC of the vm prior to the cloning? process.? When you clone a vm it also changes the mac address of the NIC and as a result the vm sees it as a new NIC and assigns it to /dev/eth1.

As a result, we now have to edit the udev config file as well as the ifcfg-eth0 file to get the newly update virtual NIC card to operate on the eth0 device.

1. Delete 70-persistent-net.rules which is under /etc/udev/rules.d/ and reboot the machine

OR


First, edit: /etc/udev/rules.d/70-persistent-net.rules

# This file was automatically generated by the /lib/udev/write_net_rules
# program, run by the persistent-net-generator.rules rules file.
#
# You can modify it, as long as you keep each rule on a single
# line, and change only the value of the NAME= key.

# PCI device 0x8086:0x100f (e1000)
#SUBSYSTEM=="net", ACTION=="add", DRIVERS=="?*", ATTR{address}=="00:50:56:be:00:30", ATTR{type}=="1", KERNEL=="eth*", NAME="eth0"

# PCI device 0x8086:0x100f (e1000)
SUBSYSTEM=="net", ACTION=="add", DRIVERS=="?*", ATTR{address}=="00:50:56:be:00:32", ATTR{type}=="1", KERNEL=="eth*", NAME="eth1"

Delete or comment the first SUBSYSTEM entry in the file.

Update the 'eth1' attribute in the remaining entry to 'eth0'

Edit /etc/sysconfig/network-scripts/ifcfg-eth0
Change the HWADDR to match the new mac address listed in the newly edited 70-persistent-net.rules file. eg in my case 00:50:56:be:00:32

like
DEVICE="eth0"
NM_CONTROLLED="yes"
ONBOOT=yes
HWADDR=00:50:56:BE:00:32
BOOTPROTO=static
 

Reeboot the machine.