The length of the Cloud Director VM names in vSphere causes issues with external backup solutions

Products

• VMware Cloud Director

Issue/Introduction

• The VMs managed by VMware Cloud Director (VCD) have a long name.
• The VM name contains the VM ID.
• You are using a backup solution such as Veritas NetBackup.

Environment

VMware Cloud Director 10.x

Cause

Before VCD 9.5 the VM name of a VM managed by VCD reported the long UUID.
Starting from VCD 9.5 the long UUID is no longer added to the VM name and is replaced by shorter 4 digit random characters.

The backup solution expects the VCD VM names to be <name>-<4 digit ID>, if they are using another format, it will cause the backups to fail."

 

Resolution

The VM you have with the UUID reported in the name on vSphere was originally managed by VCD with version older than 9.5.

In order to have the VM name updated, edit the name of the VM in VCD on the tenant portal as per documentation at documentation at Edit Virtual Machine Properties in the VMware Cloud Director Tenant Portal.