We recently migrated our ESXi server and when we bought our Vyatta VMs all the interface number changed from eth0 and eth1 to eth2 and eth3. Now when the device comes up it gets errors since those interface are no longer valid.
ESXi probably changed the MAC address during migration. (For future reference, you should try to “move” a VM, not copy it).
You could find out what the old MACs were and force them into ESXi, or you could just edit the interfaces directly and put the NEW “hw-id” into the old slots.
My experience has been that I have to manually edit the boot file - /opt/vyatta/etc/config/config.boot - in order to change them. Then reboot.