BIOS UUID and Serial Number duplicated when cloning or deploying VM from template

Products

• VMware Cloud Director

Issue/Introduction

Symptoms:

• When using VMware Cloud Director, multiple virtual machines in vCenter Server have the same BIOS UUID.
• This issue is seen when editing the .vmx file of a virtual machine.
  
  For example:
  
  uuid.bios = "## ## ## ## ## ## ## ## ## ## ## ## ##"

Environment

VMware Cloud Director 10.x

Resolution

This behavior is controlled by a system configuration value named CloneBiosUuidOnVmCopy on VMware Cloud Director.

• 1 (true) means to keep the existing BIOS UUID, and is the default value.
• 0 (false) means to generate a new BIOS UUID.

You can use the manage-config subcommand of the cell-management-tool to view or set the value of this property. To retrieve the current value of this property, use the command:

$VCLOUD_HOME/bin/cell-management-tool manage-config --lookup --name backend.cloneBiosUuidOnVmCopy

Property "backend.cloneBiosUuidOnVmCopy" has value "1".

To set this property to a value of 0, use the command:

$VCLOUD_HOME/bin/cell-management-tool manage-config -n backend.cloneBiosUuidOnVmCopy -v 0

Updating property: Property "backend.cloneBiosUuidOnVmCopy" has value "0".

Note:

• Restart of the Cloud Director cells in the server group after you make this change is not required in the latest Cloud director 10.x versions.
  
  
• This change does not affect previously existing virtual machines. Also, note that backend.cloneBiosUuidOnVmCopy should be 0 for vSAN environments as vSAN health checking has a requirement for unique bios.uuids. Duplicate bios.uuids will give false positives for vsan.check_state find_inconsistent_vms.
  
  
• Post setting cloneBiosUuidOnVmCopy parameter to 0 , Copy vApp operation would change BIOS UUID on the destination virtual machine as a clone task is initiated on vCenter Server.
  
  
• Starting vCD 9.0 a new optimized implementation of the Move operation is introduced, refer to the Developer Documentation for additional details.

Workaround:

Any of the following workarounds can be used to update the BIOS UUID and Serial number for existing VMs:

Manually removing the bios UUID from vmx file:

1. Power OFF the vApp in Cloud director UI
2. Make a note of the cluster and resource pool of the VM in vcenter.
3. Remove VM from inventory.
4. Edit vmx-file and remove all lines starting with uuid.bios
5. Include below lines in .vmx file:

6. SMBIOS.use12CharSerialNumber = "TRUE"
   smbios.assetTag = "MyCustomAssetTag"
   serialNumber = "#########"

7. Register VM again to the correct resource pool
8. Power ON the vApp from Cloud director UI