Cloning an existing CentOS 6.3 virtual machine in VirtualBox seems to be quite easy.
Right click on the machine, select clone, reinitialize the MAC addresses and create a full clone…
The clone is beeing created and after starting it up – oops, no network interfaces present?
Some error messages appear when trying to restart network services:
To solve the issue two things must be done:
1. Delete the 70-persistent-net.rules
2. Check the MAC addresses in the interface scripts within network-scripts folder
Get the new interface MAC address from the VirtualBox network settings GUI and update the HWADDR line for all affected interfaces to the new MAC.
After that reboot the system. The 70-persistent-net.rules will be re-initialized and networking should be ok again.
Another option is to delete the entire line within the ifcfg-ethx files.
HWADDR=08:00:27:92:b6:83
Also reboot the system after this change.