Just a quick note to the masses, I used VMWare Converter 5.x Stand Alone (It’s not version specific) to migrate an Ubuntu 8.04 Server I have doing SPAM filtering and when I type in “ifconfig” to determine if the IP address came up OK all I saw was localhost (127.0.0.1).  I made sure to adjust DHCP to see the new MAC address and I KNEW this was going to be an issue – not with DHCP but with converting Ubunutu like this – it looses eth0’s IP address.  Why?  Because the MAC address changes from the old VMWare Servers MAC address allocation to the new VMWare Servers MAC address allocation – essentially, the new server issues the new / imported VM a new MAC.  This makes the OS install the new MAC as an additional NIC…because it is!

I found the answer to my problems here, I used this post before to fix this same issue in the past but now I’m documenting it on my blog so I can remember :P

Post:  Eth0 disapears in VMware and Ubuntu Server

SuperkiKim is the bomb!

Essentially you shut down two services and edit a file, then bring those services up.

Here are the commands thanks for the VMWare Community Forum and SuperkiKim:

Stop services:
/etc/init.d/udev stop
/etc/init.d/networking stop
Edit the file:
nano etc/udev/rules.d/70-persistent-net.rules

Comment out the first PCI devices in the list, at the end of the line it'll say "eth0" with a "#" symbol
# SUBSYSTEM=="net", ACTION=="add", DRIVERS=="?*", ATTR{address}=="00:0c:29:36:xx:xx", ATTR{type}=="1", NAME="eth0"

Then - on the next PCI device (SUBSYSTEM) where it probably says "eth1" change that to "eth0"
Save it by exiting NANO, ctrl + x sometimes it's ctrl + alt + x
Hit "Y" to save

restart your services by typing:
/etc/init.d/udev start
/etc/init.d/networking start

ifconfig command should show you your IP that you expected!