In the event of a failed NIC card, replacing the card will result in a card with different MAC addresses. You will find that instead of replacing the existing devices used by the old card, new devices will be created by the OS. You will therefore need to do some reconfiguration so that the new card uses the same device names as the original card.

The first step is to update the udev configuration. If you check /etc/udev/rules.d you will find a file called 70-persistent-net.rules

 myserver01:root> #cd /etc/udev/rules.d
 myserver01:root> #ls
 60-fprint-autosuspend.rules  60-raw.rules             90-alsa.rules  98-kexec.rules    99-qla4xxx.rules
 60-pcmcia.rules              70-persistent-net.rules  90-hal.rules   99-qla2xxx.rules  99-qlcnic.rules

This file needs updating with the new MAC addresses. In the case of eth2, update that line with the MAC address from the new card

 # PCI device 0x14e4:0x1657 (tg3)
 SUBSYSTEM=="net", ACTION=="add", DRIVERS=="?*", ATTR{address}=="40:a8:f0:30:5a:56", ATTR{type}=="1", KERNEL=="eth*", NAME="eth2"

Next you will need to update (using eth2 as an examle) the ifcfg-eth2 configuration file in /etc/sysconfig/network-scripts. In that file you will need to update the MAC address and the UUID. The UUID for the card can be found as follows

 myserver01:root> #uuidgen eth2
 d5eb1403-e723-421a-a9a2-c0cf45f9281a

Update the configuration file

 myserver01:root> #cat ifcfg-eth2
 DEVICE=eth2
 HWADDR=40:A8:F0:30:5A:56
 TYPE=Ethernet
 UUID=d5eb1403-e723-421a-a9a2-c0cf45f9281a
 BOOTPROTO=none
 ONBOOT=yes
 MASTER=bond1
 SLAVE=yes
 USERCTL=no

In the case of multi-port cards, repeat for all ports.

On reboot the new NIC will be assigned to the correct port.