CentOS v6.3: Device eth0 does not seem to be present, delaying initialization

Dear Friends,
I have been working on setting up CentOS v6.3 and could successfully install the OS on a VMware Virtual machine. But i had trouble getting the IP Address for the machine.

Whenever I ran ifconfig I got only the loopback adapter, but never got the eth0 adapter info.

When I tried to start eht0 adapter with command ifup eth0, I got the below message:
Device eth0 does not seem to be present, delaying initialization

In my case the problem happened because of mismatch between MAC address of the actual NIC card and the MAC address in the eth0 file.
The solution that worked for me is below:

1) Ensure that MAC address (HWADDR) in the file /etc/sysconfig/network-scripts/ifcfg-eth0 is same as MAC address of the actual NIC card. If not, edit the same in the file.

Ensure that ONBOOT option is set to yes, so that the interface starts .

2) Remove /etc/udev/rules.d/70-persistent-net.rules file, it would be created on reboot with proper MAC address of the interfaces

rm -f /etc/udev/rules.d/70-persistent-net.rules

3) Restart the machine

Now you should get the IP to the device.

Hope this helps.