After customizing guest network settings, you can restart the guest network manually from within the guest operating system, or by using a method of the VirtualMachineGuestCustomizationManager managed object. This method is important for instant clone operations, but it can be used for other purposes as well.

To restart the guest network manually, see Resetting the Network Stack in a Running Virtual Machine.

To restart the guest network using the vSphere Web Services API, use the VirtualMachineGuestCustomizationManager.StartGuestNetwork_Task method. This method both reconnects the virtual NICs to the network and restarts the guest network service.

The StartGuestNetwork_Task method is supported on most popular Linux distributions.