Cloning machines in VMWare is really straightforward thing. However once you do clone a machine, you’ll be left with new MAC addresses for the network cards. In a typical scenario the cloned RHEL or CentOS machine will boot up without the local network interface. You’ll typically see the following during boot.

“Bringing up interface eth0: Device eth0 has different MAC address than expected, ignoring.”

The reason for this is that “/etc/sysconfig/network-scripts/ifcfg-eth0” contains a variable called “HWADDR=”. Do the following to add the appropriate MAC address and restore networking functionality.
• As the root user (or a user with appropriate permissions)
• Type “ifconfig -a”
• From the displayed information, find eth0 (this is the default first Ethernet adapter)
• Locate the number next to the HWaddr. This is your MAC address

A typical output would be as follows.

eth0 Link encap:Ethernet HWaddr 00:1B:21:1F:66:88
inet addr:192.168.0.5 Bcast:192.168.0.255 Mask:255.255.255.0
… the additional output has been removed…

Now you edit “/etc/sysconfig/network-scripts/ifcfg-eth0” and modify the “HWADDR=” variable to include your MAC address. E.g.

HWADDR=00:1B:21:1F:66:88

Save the file. At this point you run command below as root from the command prompt.
# service network restart

You’ve now restored networking.