I had the prerequisite of keeping the MAC address of this VM. I first read this post I found with google. http://zealkabi.blogspot.com/2008/09/vmware-esx-server-3x-procedure-to-set.html

I first tried it manually but got the famous error message “The MAC address entered is not in the valid range. Valid values are between xx:xx:xx:xx:xx”

 Then I removed the vm from ESX inventory; download the vmx file and changed the ethernet0.addressType to static and ethernet0.Address = “01:0C:29:B0:27:E1″ with Notepad++.I deleted original file from the Datastore and upload the vmx file back. I started the vm again and got the message below:

Please specify a static Ethernet address for ethernet0. Failed to configure ethernet0

Without additional setting in the vmx config file you won’t be able to assign a static MAC address in the range your require. To disable mac address checking before boot add the following line in the vmx file.

 ethernetX.checkMACAddress = “false”

Thanks to Jason Nash I fixed this problem.
http://jasonnash.wordpress.com/2008/08/30/disabling-mac-address-checking-in-vmware/

My working config changes:

ethernet0.checkMACAddress = “false”

ethernet0.addressType = “static”

ethernet0.Address = “00:0C:29:B0:27:E1″

I finshed one of my JeOS virtual machines running with ESX server and cloned the JeOS virtual machine.  JeOS appliance was booted and I logged on. A bash script run to change default passwords and SSH server was re-installed to generate SSH keys; immediately after apt-get tried to install SSH server I got an error and script stopped. I run ifconfig and saw no ethernet interface on Eth0 or Eth1.

The OS did not active the eth0 interface because virtual machine has been cloned and new MAC address assigned to the network interface. In network scripts only eth0 has been enabled and set for DHCP. Open file /etc/udev/rules.d/70-persistent-net.rules to see the problem where two network interfaces are shows with diffrent MAC addresses.

To fix this problem run the following command:

• sudo rm /etc/udev/rules.d/70-persistent-net.rules

Reboot and the problem has been solved. This issue is not documented and part of the JeOS documentation yet.  I hope this post will help you out there. Credit goes to “oneloveamaru” who helped me in the right direction for finding a solution on my problem.