RHEL 6 virtual machines cloned using "virt-clone" have inconsistent interface naming

Solution Verified - Updated -

Issue

  • A RHEL6 guest which has "eth0" as its interface is cloned using "virt-clone". The cloned machine doesn't have "eth0" anymore and it has named its interface as eth1. Why does it use the next interface name which is not available in the source machine?
  • If we clone a guest which has eth0 and eth1, then the cloned guests' interfaces will be named as eth2 and eth3. How can we resolve this?
  • The cloned machine will display the below error message while starting network interface eth0 per /etc/sysconfig/network-scripts/ifcfg-eth0:

    Device eth0 does not seem to be present, delaying initializtion
    
  • Below is /etc/sysconfig/network-scripts/ifcfg-eth0 for the newly cloned guest which is a copy of the original machine from which a clone was created:

    DEVICE="eth0"
    HWADDR="52:54:00:5B:1C:AA"
    NM_CONTROLLED="no"
    BOOTPROTO="dhcp"
    ONBOOT="yes"
    

Environment

  • Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6 with KVM as host
  • Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6 virtual machine

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