Instant clone customization task StartNetwork fails on RHEL 8.6, RockyLinux 8.6 and AlmaLinux 8.6

Products

• VMware vSphere ESXi

Issue/Introduction

Symptoms:

• Instant clone customization task StartNetwork fails on RHEL 8.6, RockyLinux 8.6 and AlmaLinux 8.6.
• The failure exception is vim.fault.UnexpectedCustomizationFault, and error message is 'Failed to start the network service in the VM'.
• The error log from instant clone customization log file /var/log/vmware-gosc/instant_clone_customization.log in the guest OS is as below:

YYYY-MM-DDTHH:MM:SS ERROR: Guest customization failed: 244,Failed to ifdown and ifup eth ...

Environment

VMware vSphere ESXi 7.x

Cause

The "ifdown/ifup" commands, used in StartNetwork task, have been deprecated in RHEL 8.6, RockyLinux 8.6 and AlmaLinux 8.6.

Resolution

Currently there is no resolution.

Workaround:

To workaround the issue, please install the network-scripts package to avoid failure:
yum install network-scripts