SIOCSIFADDR Error After Moving Ubuntu Virtual Machine to ESX Server

After moving a virtual machine (Ubuntu guest) from Vmware Server to VMWare ESX server using VMware Converter, I received the following error after powering up the new VM:

SIOCSIFADDR: No such device eth0
eth0: ERROR while getting interface flags: No such device

When I ran ifconfig only lo showed up. No eth0 to be seen anywhere. After hunting around the net for a few minutes I came across some tips that helped.

First I ran:
ifconfig -a

This showed me two adapters – lo and eth2. Aha!

sudo ifconfig eth2 up brought the interface up for me, and sudo dhclient got me an ipaddress, but after rebooting the problem came back.

Next step was to edit this file:
/etc/udev/rules.d/70-persistent-net.rules

Looking at that file, I could see my adapter listed as well as a couple others. I commented out the ones with the wrong MAC address, found the correct one and changed the entry for eth2 to eth0.

I rebooted and everything was gold.

Thank you Google.