Open-vm-tools/vm-tools issue

hello we are trying to move our vm from centos 7 to rockylinux 9, we mainly use vmware esxi + vcenter
were on latest vsphere version, same goes for vcenter, rockylinux run smooth on it, issue is when we try to clone from the rockylinux template we created we always get the NIC0 disconnected and need to manually switch it on, things we already tried to fix this
we installed vm-tools the default one from vcenter which shows a lot of bugs during installation, we then found some articles about switching to open-vm-tools and even installed perl, but same issue
network in template is set to connect on power and it shows connected without any issue
did anyone have a similar issue ?