Change ipv4_address forces VM replacement?!

Welcome to the forum - please reformat your message - the output above is rather mangled.

Whether to force a replacement on change is entirely up to the individual provider implementation of the resource.

Since the parameter you are changing is apparently part of VMware’s “customization” functionality which takes place during VM creation, it makes sense that VMware would need to re-create the VM to create it with different customization options - so the Terraform provider would appear to just be surfacing the properties of the underlying infrastructure.