I ran into a bug where the VMware Identity Manager / VMware WorkspaceONE virtual appliances (3.2.0.1) would not persist changes to network settings across reboots. Attempting to update the DNS resolver addresses were reverted when the appliance rebooted. It didn’t seem to matter whether the changes were applied on the vApp tab in vCenter, directly onto the appliance using vami_config_net, or by directly editing network configuration settings in the OS; all methods reverted the appliance’s DNS resolvers to the previous entries at reboot.

After some back and forth with VMware’s Business Critical Support, we determined that KB 54981 resolved the issue. The KB article is specific to changing IP addresses in a cloned system, but it applied to our case as well. Deleting the three backup files allowed the new resolver addresses to persist across reboots.