Virtual Machine UUID (bios.uuid) may changes post a HA isolation event

Products

• VMware vSphere ESXi

Issue/Introduction

To fix the incorrect UUID.

Symptoms:

• ESXi host(s) recently experienced a HA isolation event and multiple VMs were powered-off
• Datastores experienced an All-Paths-Down(APD) situation 
• After recovering from the outage, one or more VMs have their Virtual Machine UUID changed to a different value
• Full or Incremental Backups of these VMs could fail with the below error:

"A Filespace already exists for virtualmachine <VM Name> but with a different virtualmachine UUID <old uuid> than the current virtualmachine UUID (<current uuid>

Cause

This behavior is caused due to  the binary-to-text conversion functions not matching, resulting in a VM being 
incorrectly configured with a UUID.

Resolution

This issue is resolved in vCenter Server  6.5 U3f and 6.7 U3b versions.
To download go to Customer Connect Downloads

Workaround:
To workaround this issue edit the VMX file of the VM and update it with the line:

uuid.action = "keep"

This would ensure that the uuid of the VM does not change unless manually updated.
See KB https://kb.vmware.com/s/article/1541 for details on this workaround.

Additional Information

See KB https://kb.vmware.com/s/article/1541

Impact/Risks:
Backup software and other products with APIs depending on the VM UUID might fail to perform the expected tasks.