Hi,
I could not get network to start on my VE on Ubuntu, and later when I tried on Debian. I discovered that the /etc/network/interfaces.template listed and the VE was discovering it on startup as well. Thus networking was broken. I found this when I ran invoke-rc.d networking restart
.
I commented out the entries in the interfaces.template file and it worked. Note that making changes to /etc/networking/interfaces will be overwritten when the VE is restarted. Hope this helps someone out there breaking their head like I did.
Venkat