DHCP not working on Ubuntu 22.04 and above template

To work around this issue, VMware recommends to prepare a VM template running an Ubuntu Guest OS with an empty /etc/machine-id.

Solution 1 - Unset machine-id on template

1. Clone your VM template to a new VM.
2. Power on the new VM and run these commands inside the Linux Guest OS:

echo -n > /etc/machine-id
rm /var/lib/dbus/machine-id
ln -s /etc/machine-id /var/lib/dbus/machine-id

3. Re-clone the new VM to a new VM template.

Solution 2 - Change client indentifier to MAC

Alternatively, prepare a VM template explicitly setting the dhcp client identifier to mac.

Example 1 - dhcp-identifier

set the dhcp-identifier: mac in the /etc/netplan/*.yaml file as below:

network:
  version: 2
  renderer: networkd
  ethernets:
    default:
      match:
        name: e*
      dhcp4: yes
      dhcp-identifier: mac

Example 2 - ClientIdentifier

set the ClientIdentifier=mac in the /etc/systemd/network/default.network file.

Reference: link