How to remove old NICs in RHEL / CentOS 6 or 5

Removing old NICS from your virtual machines is typical when moving virtual machines to different hyper visors. Ie, moving a VMware Virtual Machine to to Hyper-V or VirtualBox.

Using your favorite editor, edit the following

/etc/udev/rules.d/70-persistent-net.rules (CentOS 6 only)

The first device will be the old NIC, comment it out with a # and change the name=””

to your old NIC value, typically eth0

then save the file and restart networking. This in most cases will solve the issue.

For CentOS / RHEL 5.X

remove the following

/etc/sysconfig/networking/devices/ifcfg-eth*
/etc/sysconfig/networking/profiles/default/ifcfg-eth*
/etc/sysconfig/network-scripts/ifcfg-eth*

then reboot

#reboot -t now

Then run  system-config-network

This will allow the creation of the new device with the network settings you provide.

finally restart networking.

/etc/init.d/network restart