OVM Serial Numbers

[EHacking]

We have several clusters of OVM Hosts, and each of the VM's on those hosts inherit the serial number of the Host. Any ideas how to set a separate serial number for each VM? See attached.

[Flex-Jeremy · Accepted solution]

Hi Erick, 

I am reaching out to you directly about this issue. In order to confirm the issue, you are seeing I need information about your environment that you may not what to share publicly. 

But I believe that this is related to an existing enhancement that someone from your company submitted about FNMS not supporting HP Superdomes. 

[winvarma]

Hi @Flex-Jeremy 

we are also facing similar issue and because of the duplicate serial no for the VM's running on the same host will there be any impact on the compliance and license calculation? what is the best practice to follow in this scenario?

Hi @EHacking - Do you have any inputs on this if you have come across any issues because of dupliate serial no's.

thanks in advance.

Regards,

Vinay

[ChrisG]

If a serial number appears on exactly 2 computer records then the import process may merge those records into one inventory device record - that could potentially have an impact on license consumption calculations, as the 2 computers may only be counted once. I can't think of any other obvious impacts on license consumption from having duplicate serial numbers.

In terms of a best practice, I would suggest understanding what is causing the duplicates and then considering what can be done to ensure each computer has a unique serial number. (Of course, that may be difficult if it involves the need for some kind of enhancement or change to FlexNet behavior to support a platform like the HP Superdomes that were mentioned earlier in this thread.)

[winvarma]

Hi @ChrisG ,

thanks for the quick response on the query.

In our case the environment OLVM(Oracle VM) and the serial no of VM's are set as per the UUID of the Host per the oracle documentation.

• Host ID: Set each virtual machine’s serial number to the UUID of the host.

• Seems like the serial no. can be customized but we have to show what is the impact for the license calculation because of the duplicate serial no to the relevant stakeholders to make the changes to the Vm serial no. 

• https://support.oracle.com/knowledge/Oracle%20Linux%20and%20Virtualization/2786377_1.html   

• We are having On-prem 2020 R1 setup and is there any enhancement how the licenses are calculated in these cases in newer versions of FNMS?Seems the serial no can be customized changing the default value set as per the host serial no.

Appreciate further help thoughts if this is a known case and what would the best approach and is there any documentation on this from Flexera and if any one else came across this scenario.

Regards,

Vinay.

[ChrisG]

The following references touch on the behavior I've described related to the merging of exactly 2 computers with the same serial number into one (and a setting which can be used to change the "2" computers to some other limit) here:

• https://community.flexera.com/t5/FNMS-Internal-Knowledge-Base/Virtual-machine-inventories-with-same-serial-number-overwrite/ta-p/1836
• https://community.flexera.com/t5/FlexNet-Manager-Blog/Inventory-Device-Matching-Transparency-in-FlexNet-Manager-Suite/bc-p/208658/highlight/true#M366
• https://community.flexera.com/t5/FlexNet-Manager-Forum/will-device-not-get-inventoried-if-it-have-duplicate-serial/m-p/157329/highlight/true#M8044

I don't have access to the Oracle page that you've linked, but are you saying that this recommends the serial number on each VM should be set to the same value? That doesn't sound right to me - that would not be a good practice in my experience as it will make it difficult for any process that uses serial numbers to uniquely identify individual VMs.