I have few virtual machines running SLES15 SP1, and the IP customization would not work during the failover due to the below documented issue. article has the work-around for RHEL but not for other OSs.
https://kb.vmware.com/s/article/76492
I went ahead and made below entry into the interface config file to allow network services to pick up the IP even if there is no link, and the IP customization is working correctly now.
echo "LINK_REQUIRED='no'" >> /etc/sysconfig/network/ifcfg-eth0
Any issues that should be anticipated in this approach ?