Virtual machine backup/restore fails when using VMware Virtual Disk Development Kit (VDDK) 6.0

Products

• VMware vSphere ESXi

Issue/Introduction

Symptoms:

• Cannot perform a virtual machine backup or restore when two or more virtual machines have the same BIOS UUID.
• When using VMware Virtual Disk Development Kit (VDDK) 6.0, virtual machine backup/restore may fail when two virtual machines have the same BIOS UUID.

Environment

VMware Virtual Disk Development 1.2
Virtual Disk Development Kit 6.0

Cause

This issue occurs if there are two or more virtual machines in the datastore with the same BIOS UUID and occurs when VixDiskLib_Open(Ex) fetches the virtual disk's block map.

During a backup/restore of a virtual machine, VDDK 6.0.0 tries to find requested virtual machine by looking up its BIOS UUID, unlike the earlier VDDK releases that locate a virtual machine using the MoRef. Because a BIOS UUID is not guaranteed to be unique, unlike a MoRef, this new behavior may cause problems after operations such as cloning or out of place virtual machine restore.

Resolution

This is a known issue affecting VDDK 6.0.

Currently, there is no resolution or workaround.

Additional Information

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