[HorizonXP]

Ah, fair enough. But it looks like that introduces another problem. When you spin up a VM in ESXi, it generates a new MAC address for each interface. So it would be great to create systemd .network files that bind to those MAC addresses. Except you don't what MAC addresses you need to match against. The only flow I see working is:

1) Create a VM with your interfaces, but don't boot it. 2) Take the MAC addresses and enter them into your .network files, created via cloud-config/Ignition 3) Mount the cloud-config/Ignition file to your VM and boot

Which is a bit painful to do manually when you have 10 VMs, with 5-10 interfaces each. I'd love to automate this, and if you happen to have a suggestion here, I'd really appreciate it.

Edit: Oh, and when I said it had an eno* number, it's more like eno16777736, which is not very predictable at all.

[wmf]

You don't have to match against MAC addresses, although there's virtually no documentation about how to do it any other way. In the pre-systemd past I've successfully created udev rules that match PCI slots so that the configuration does not depend on MAC addresses. It looks like the same thing should be possible (with trial and error) with path globbing in systemd.