Hi all,
I believe you're facing some design limitation of the "Customize VM settings" mode which was still the case for 5.1
"Make identical copy" works as expected, since the idea is that captured VM must be exactly the same such that two instances can't co-exist while both powered on. That has its own use-cases like backup. Say you run some DB and configured all clients to its IP. Now you accidentally format hard-drive. But thanks to "identical" copy you can fix that very quickly - just instantiate, power-on and it will reply on same IP as before.
If you don't want that, you should be ideally using "Customize VM settings" mode. The problem is that, as you correctly pointed out, it throws away all networking topology settings.
I'm not aware of any good "automatic" workaround. Thing you may consider are:
1) use REST API which will allow you to pass additional sections for the "instantiate" call where you can provide networking setup
2) export OVF in the so called "loss-less" mode (was added in 5.1) which will produce OVF with network sections describing all details of the setup including topology, IP and MAC addresses. You may need to manually remove IP addresses from it, but maybe you can do without it - needs to be tested. The idea is to import back into VCD and UI (and REST API) may actually repopulate some of the networking info. Again needs to be tested. If it works, maybe this will be a better solution for you.
Hope that helps.
/Andrii