Overview
Live Optics Optical Prime will be adding UUID information for Hyper-V VMs to the General Optical Prime Excel spread sheet. Optical Prime currently displays the VM UUID and Instance UUID for VMware VMs only in the VMware excel.
Hyper-V UUID and Instance UUID
Optical Prime will add UUID and instance UUID columns to the VM tab in the general excel.
VMware UUID and Instance UUID values already exist in the following excel:
General Excel
- Cloud Pricing tab
- Instance UUID only
VMWare Excel
- VM tab
- UUID and Instance UUID.
Hyper-V UUID will be added to:
General Excel
- Cloud pricing tab
- Instance UUID column (blank for Hyper-V VMs)
- VM Tab
- New UUID and Instance UUID columns
What is a UUID?
To ensure all virtual machines are identified properly, each virtual machine is automatically assigned a universal unique identifier (UUID). If a virtual machine is moved or copied, the Workstation offers the choice of creating a new UUID the first time a virtual machine is powered on. This new UUID is based on the physical computer's identifier and the path to the virtual machine's configuration file in its new location.
VMware uses two UUIDs to identify a VM. BIOS UUID (uuid.bios in .vmx file) was the original VM identifier implemented to identify a VM and is derived from the hardware VM. However, it’s not unique. If a VM is cloned, the clone will have the same BIOS UUID. This introduced Instance UUID (vc.uuid in .vmx file), which is generated by vCenter and is unique within a single vCenter (two VMs in different vCenters can have the same Instance UUID).When VMs are failed over, Instance UUIDs are changed.
Hyper-V does not have a concept of UUID vs InstanceUUID. Hyper-V just has one UUID per VM. Therefore, the UUID and InstanceUUID fields will be the same value.
The UUID value can be found in the BIOSGUID property of the Msvm_VirtualSystemSettingData class which is available via WMI : https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/win32/hyperv_v2/msvm-virtualsystemsettingdata#properties