Sorry to reply to such an old thread, but I didn't see that you had gotten any answers and I have seen part of the issue before.
The reason your RHEL 6 VMs deployed from a template get their ethernet interfaces named "eth1" instead of "eth0" is because of the way RHEL 6 uses UDEV for device discovery. There is a MAC addres sin the udev rules for network from the original VM from which the template was created. When a new VM is made from the template, this is a new MAC address the udev stuff sees (the MAC of the new VM). It names this one eth1. If you were to deploy ANOTHER VM from this VM (say by cloning), it would come up with eth2.
The fix is (at least works for me):
- Convert your template back to a VM and power it on.
- Login and get root (or login as root)
- edit "/etc/udev/rules.d/70-persistent-net.rules" with your fave text editor
- remove ALL lines near the bottom of the file after the top block of comments. These will all start with a line like:
"# PCI device...." & "SUBSYSTEM...."
delete all of these
5. Save and exit the file
6. Shutdown the VM and convert it to template again. DO NOT BOOT THE VM AGAIN before conversion to template. If you do, it will "discover" the NIC again and add a new line to the file and then your clones will be with eth1 again.
The clones from you template should now discover thier newly created NIC and add one set of lines to the file. This will be eth0.
Hope that helps.
mrsims