[BlueOnyx:13585] NICs on VMWare ESXi

[William Thackrey]

I've run into an odd problem, and was wondering if anyone on the list had seen (and hopefully solved) it.  I'm setting up a Dell R805 server with VMWare ESXi 5.1.  Running the free version of ESXi at the moment.  No vCenter, No vCloud Director.  I've built a BlueOnyx 5108R VM with 2 NICs by spinning up a VM with no OS, mounting the ISO and installing it.  The VM behaves as expected.  I then cloned the VM by copying the vmx and vmdk files into a new directory in the datastore, renaming the vmx file and adding it to inventory.  (Without cVenter or vCD, there's no "Clone VM" function available from the ESXi GUI.)

The problem is that the new VM has no NICs, nor does it "remember" the IP addresses of the original VM.  I can add an address for eth0 using the network_settings.sh script, but it looks like the actual NIC devices are missing.  They're there in the vmx file and in the VM settings in the ESXi GUI.  I can remove and add NICs in the VM settings in the ESXi GUI, but those NICs either never show up in the VM itself, or, if they do, are not persistent through a restart.

Note that this does not happen with other VM types.  Scientific Linux, Ubuntu and various WIndows VMs work correctly.  This seems limited to BlueOnyx.

Ideas anyone?