RHEL 6.6 eth0 changes to eth2 when cloned VM

Last week we had a servers cloned running
9.0.2.1-347714.rhel6.ga.x86_64
Red Hat Enterprise Linux Server release 6.6 (Santiago)

eth2 Link encap:Ethernet HWaddr 00:50:56:9F:63:EE
inet addr:10.23.122.18 Bcast:10.23.122.255 Mask:255.255.255.0
inet6 addr: fe80::250:56ff:fe9f:63ee/64 Scope:Link
UP BROADCAST RUNNING MULTICAST MTU:1500 Metric:1
Now setting it as eth2 was not an an issue , it comes up and I can access fro outside etc, but the Application gives a lot of errors, and the vendor
has requested that it be set back to eth0, now I have had a look at the net and tried

1) deleting the /etc/udev/rules.d/70-persistent-net.rules file and rebooting, still comes back as eth2
2) modified /etc/sysconfig/network-scripts/ifcfg-eth2 (change and make it ifcfg-eth2)
3) Modifying /etc/udev/rules.d/70-persistent-net.rules info in the file to look at eth0 like below

SUBSYSTEM=="net", ACTION=="add", DRIVERS=="?*", ATTR{address}=="00:50:56:9f:63:ee", ATTR{type}=="1", KERNEL=="eth*", NAME="eth0"
4) and then reboot , still comes up as eth2
5) tried renaming the NIC
ip link set eth2 eth0
Error: either "dev" is duplicate, or "eth0" is a garbage

Anybody have any ideas how I can get the server up as the original name of link eth0 ?

Zelko