Ubuntu 22.04 network freezing

I'm in a bit of a pickle here. I have a bunch of Ubuntu 22.04 VMs, hosted on multiple ESXi servers. When I try to apply netplan using netplan apply, system networking freezes and no packets are sent (checked with tcpdump). Also, when I try to install systemd-timesyncd and enable ntp service, same thing happens. I've tried different things, including tweaks on keepalived parameters in kernel, but no luck so far... Any ideas why this happens? --- **Netplan config** (as per [Artem's](https://unix.stackexchange.com/users/260833/artem-s-tashkinov) comment)

network:
  version: 2
  ethernets:
    ens160:
      dhcp4: no
      dhcp6: no
      optional: true
      match:
        macaddress: "00:50:56:94:c2:1a"
      addresses:
      - 172.16.96.31/20
      nameservers:
        addresses:
        - 172.16.1.3
      routes:
      - to: 0.0.0.0/0
        via: 172.16.1.3
        on-link: true
      - to: 172.16.1.0/24 
        via: 172.16.111.254
      - to: 172.18.0.0/16 
        via: 172.16.111.254
      - to: 172.16.53.104/32 
        via: 172.16.111.254
      - to: 172.16.8.0/24 
        via: 172.16.111.254
      - to: 172.16.56.0/24 
        via: 172.16.111.254
      - to: 172.16.96.0/20 
        via: 172.16.111.254
      - to: 172.16.49.0/24 
        via: 172.16.111.254

P.S 1: I added match to point out to the exact MAC Address on my network interface as part of my efforts, but it didn't solve the problem.