RedHat Server duplicates eth0 on boot

I have setup a RedHat 9 VM on Azure cloud with one virtual NIC which the VM recognizes as eth0. However, I have noticed that after booting up or restarting, the VM creates a duplicate device eth1 with the same IP address as eth0. eth1 does not appear anywhere in /etc/sysconfig/network-scripts/* Trying to delete it using ip link delete eth1 produces the error RTNETLINK answers: Operation not supported. Trying iw dev eth1 del produces the error command failed: No such device (-19). Has anyone ever encountered this? How do I get rid of eth1?

Output of ip addr show

1: lo: <LOOPBACK,UP,LOWER_UP> mtu 65536 qdisc noqueue state UNKNOWN group default qlen 1000
    link/loopback 00:00:00:00:00:00 brd 00:00:00:00:00:00
    inet 127.0.0.1/8 scope host lo
       valid_lft forever preferred_lft forever
    inet6 ::1/128 scope host
       valid_lft forever preferred_lft forever
2: eth0: <BROADCAST,MULTICAST,UP,LOWER_UP> mtu 1500 qdisc mq state UP group default qlen 1000
    link/ether 00:0d:3a:7e:38:97 brd ff:ff:ff:ff:ff:ff
    inet 10.208.58.25/24 brd 10.208.58.255 scope global noprefixroute eth0
       valid_lft forever preferred_lft forever
    inet6 fe80::20d:3aff:fe7e:3897/64 scope link
       valid_lft forever preferred_lft forever
3: eth1: <BROADCAST,MULTICAST,SLAVE,UP,LOWER_UP> mtu 1500 qdisc mq master eth0 state UP group default qlen 1000
    link/ether 00:0d:3a:7e:38:97 brd ff:ff:ff:ff:ff:ff
    altname enP56023p0s2
    altname enP56023s1
    inet 10.208.58.25/24 brd 10.208.58.255 scope global noprefixroute eth1
       valid_lft forever preferred_lft forever
    inet6 fe80::1c5a:6948:4f3e:eb48/64 scope link tentative noprefixroute
       valid_lft forever preferred_lft forever

Updates

Output of nmcli connection show

NAME                UUID                                  TYPE      DEVICE
System eth0         5fb06bd0-0bb0-7ffb-45f1-d6edd65f3e03  ethernet  eth0
Wired connection 1  89a97159-d783-33fb-a2a7-e6e4b82601d4  ethernet  eth1
eth0                7b956762-5a6d-4bc3-b568-54f7b82a5ed1  ethernet  --

More updates

Creating an ifcfg-eth1 in /etc/sysconfig/network-scripts/ with the entries below seems to solve my problem:

DEVICE=eth1
ONBOOT=no

eth1 is still present but at least it does not get assigned an IP address hence the affected service does not crash.

That looks like you have a bond interface configured on your system. You can confirm this by running ip -d addr show, which will show you additional interface configuration details. You should see that eth0 is a bond interface; the output should include something like:

    bond mode 802.3ad miimon 140 ...

We already see that eth1 is a member of the eth0 bond from your existing output:

3: eth1: <BROADCAST,MULTICAST,SLAVE,UP,LOWER_UP> mtu 1500 qdisc mq master eth0 state UP group default qlen 1000

Specifically, the master eth0 part. In the -d output, you should see:

    bond_slave state ACTIVE mii_status UP link_failure_count ...

The interface is probably configured via NetworkManager (/etc/sysconfig/network-scripts is mostly of historic interest); take a look at the toutput of nmcli connection show.