Comment 86 for bug 1770082

@Mathieu: I reinstalled my Virtualbox VM (using the ubuntu-18.04-server-amd64.iso image) and tested again and the result was the same.

netplan config:
ubuntu@ubuntu:~$ cat /etc/netplan/01-netcfg.yaml
# This file describes the network interfaces available on your system
# For more information, see netplan(5).
network:
  version: 2
  renderer: networkd
  ethernets:
    eth0:
      match:
          macaddress: 08:00:27:f0:97:15
      set-name: eth0
      dhcp4: yes

Result after reboot:
ubuntu@ubuntu:~$ ip address 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> mtu 1500 qdisc noop state DOWN group default qlen 1000
    link/ether 08:00:27:f0:97:15 brd ff:ff:ff:ff:ff:ff

As you can see, the interface is successfully renamed, but the IP address is not applied.

Do you have an idea why it works with the ubuntu-18.04-live-server-amd64.iso image and not with ubuntu-18.04-server-amd64.iso? Perhaps it depends on something from cloud-init package?