I had originally seen this error when I copied a vm image to a larger drive – the ethernet interface had a static I.P. but stopped working. When I created a new interface that worked fine. This time, I look around on the web to figure out what was happening. It turns out that the copied images would change the mac address. Under debian, this would cause the udev system to create a new ethernet interface for the mac address, mapped to ethX (where X is 1 plus the last network adapter it created). By the time I started it on my new vmware server, I had two ethernet addresses, so it created two new interfaces, eth3 and eth4. I was using eth1 for networking so changing it to eth4 enabled internet access.
In /etc/udev/rules.d/70-persistent-net.rules is where the information about the ethernet cards and their mac addresses was stored. I compared this to the information from the .vmx config file for the virtual machine to determine what network card was mapped to each ethX interface.