After some searching, i found out that there is a device manager for the Linux kernel named “udev” which remembers the settings from the NIC of the virtual machine before it was cloned. To fix the issue simply delete the the following file and it will be regenerated properly on reboot.

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

via Random IT Stuff » ‘Device eth0 does not seem to be present’ error after cloning a linux machine.

This worked for me with a VirtualBox clone that was giving me problems.  Google is simply an amazing resource!  And kudos to the linked site for coming up first with a no nonsense answer.