Imported VMs from VirtualBox to VMware Workstation Pro 15 and networking doesn't work for Ubuntu 18.04 server only. Other OSes work just fine.

[eashenden]

I know similar questions has been asked a bunch of times, but I have yet to find an answer that resolves my problem. On my Windows 10 Enterprise host I ported a bunch of VMs over from VirtualBox to VMware Workstation Pro 15 and I've been having network issues with Ubuntu 18.04 server VMs specifically. Ubuntu 18.04 desktop, Ubuntu 20.04 desktop, and CentOS minimal (CLI) all ported just fine and work. ifconfig shows ens33 and lo. lo has an ip, netmask, etc, but ens33 has a MAC and a couple other things but no IP. For the Ubuntu server VMs, that don't work, I've tried:

• Setting the network to bridged (that's how they ported over) as well as NAT.
• Opening Virtual Network Editor and making sure the correct adapter is selected for VMnet0.
• Updating the mac address in VMware, then updating /etc/network/interfaces with that new mac address (it was empty before), but I think that might have been the old way to do it so I tried "sudo ip link set dev ens33 address <new mac address>".
• Turning off my firewalls to test it like that, but I didn't think that was the issue since the network worked for other VMs, and it didn't make a difference.
• Installing a new Ubuntu 18.04 server VM and on that, networking worked fine, so it must have something to do with porting them over.
• sudo ifconfig ens33 down/up

I only started using VMs about 6 months ago, so I'm pretty new with them. While I'm confident I did the export/import of the ova properly, I'm not sure if I'm making a beginners mistake elsewhere. I tried to list most of the things I've tried, but I'm sure I missed a few things. I'll try to grab any extra info you need as soon as possible and add an update. Any help would be much appreciated, thank you.

[continuum]

A Ubuntu-server which used to run inside VirtualBox may assume that the nic - the associated mac address was assigned to - is just out to lunch and so it may want to reserve that mac address incase the nic comes back.

You may look up your network related udev-rules - /etc/udev

[eashenden]

Thank you for that easy to understand explanation for why this could be happening. I'm looking inside my /etc/udev/rules.d/70-snap.core.rules since that is the only file in the udev directory that has anything. However, I don't see anything related to the MAC address in there, or really anything network related. I'm going to hit google to see if I am misunderstanding something, but if you might be able to explain if I'm looking for something like my old MAC address or something else I would appreciate that. Thanks again for your help!

[eashenden · Accepted solution]

Oh WOW. Thank you continuum!!! I was looking into what you said and it took me to editing my /etc/netplan/*.yml file which I guess my ens33 was renamed from what it was before on virtualbox. Once I renamed it correctly and rebooted (not sure if the reboot was necessary), everything works now. Gosh I always try to avoid asking questions because the answer is usually out there. Thank you for pointing me towards the answer, you are greatly appreciated.