Duplicate serial number VM's with no host alert

[sasikumar_r]

Hi All,

We have Four VM's with different names (A,b,c,d), but same serial number(VM 01234) and running on 4 different hosts (ESX1,esx2,esx3,esx4). VM's have agent installed and they are sending the inventory daily. Also we have a Vmware inventory rule in place which is gathering Vcenter and host inventory without any issues.

However we still we see the host detail did not get updated for these 4 VM's automatically. Within the host also we could not see these 4 vm's linked to them (Other Vm's which has unique serial numbers are linked to these hosts correctly).

If more than one VM uses same serialnumber then FNMS cannot be map the host to them? if yes how can this be resolved? Please advice.

Thank you
Sasi

[jasonlu · Accepted solution]

@sasikumar_r , it's not serial number, it is the uuid of the VMware guest  that is the identifier used to match the vmguest to the vmhost info. The host-guest info pulled from a Vmware Rule only has uuids.

For vmguests, duplicate serial numbers are a strong indication that the uuids are identical as well (this is what the serial number based on).

Because this uuid is not unique FNMS cannot do the guest-host join, as it doesn't know which host to choose.

The remediation here is to bring the guest down and make that uuid unique for each guest. This in turn will change the serial.

There is a potential that a changed serial number could break some hardware based encryption, so check if the guest is using any.

Backstory: moving a vmguest Beacon from one data center to another resulted in the uuid/serial changing on the beacon. This broke the Beacon password store and encryption strings in adapters.

[sasikumar_r]

Thank you for the clarification @jasonlu !