How do I get a network interface up in rhel 7?

I figured it out and I can see why I got the "read the manual" type comment. The issue was rather simple and I'm sure any sysadmin would have figured it out right away. But for us programmer types who have to do sysadmin stuff out of necessity here's what was going on.

Short answer: My MAC address was incorrect in my /etc/sysconfig/network-scripts/ifcfg-ens192 configuration.

Long explanation: VMware generates a new mac address for each new virtual nic when you provision a new VM from a template. Seems reasonable. But when you look at the hardware address configured in the VMWare setting it only shows you the first four octet in a disabled text box that will not allow you to see the rest. My mac address in the configuration seemed to have the same first four octets so I assumed incorrectly that the mac address in the config was correct. After shutting down the VM, I could scroll to the right and see the rest of the mac address. Upon noticing it was different, I changed it in my config and everything worked.

If Redhat devs read this site, please put some meaningful error messages when things like this go wrong. Thanks!

If RHEL 7.2 is running as VMWare VM and relying on DHCP allocation ensure that your /etc/sysconfig/network-scripts/ifcfg-ens192 file has ONBOOT=yes. For some reason in my instance it was set to ONBOOT=no during installation.

The HWADDR line is not needed.

After modification you can restart your network using /etc/init.d/network restart or better still systemctl restart network and the instance will be allocated an IP address.