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You are here: Home / Apple / Quick Tip - How to change serial number for Mac OS X VM?

Quick Tip - How to change serial number for Mac OS X VM?

04.28.2015 by William Lam // 5 Comments

Last week I wrote an article on how to ensure unique serial numbers are generated when cloning Mac OS X VMs in vCloud Director and as part of that research, I also came across another neat trick that I learned from one of our Engineers, Regis Duchesne. It turns outs that in recent releases of ESXi and Fusion, you can now set a specific serial number for a Mac OS X VM for customers who may require this for testing purposes.

mac-osx-serial
To set a particular serial number, you simply just need to add the following setting to your VMX file (which can also be automated when working with ESXi via the vSphere API):

serialNumber = "SERIAL-NUMBER"

Although, I was not able to find the particular release of ESXi and Fusion that introduced this capability, this trick could come in handy for those of you who have this specific requirement.

More from my site

  • Quick Tip - Cloning Mac OS X VMs with unique serial numbers in vCloud Director
  • How to change hardware serial number for Mac OS X Guest?
  • Using vSphere Guest Operations API on macOS Guests? 
  • VMXNET3 driver now included in Mac OS X 10.11 (El Capitan)+
  • ESXi 6.0 on Apple Xserve 3,1

Categories // Apple, ESXi, Fusion, vSphere Tags // apple, bios.uuid, hardware serial number, osx

Comments

  1. Andy Scott says

    05/12/2015 at 1:25 am

    I've run into an issue where serials being generated are including non alphanumeric characters. This is causing regex issues in the development environment. Do you know a fix for this?

    Reply
  2. Cloud Guy says

    06/05/2015 at 7:37 pm

    William, do you know if there is a limit to number of VMware VM installed on Windows, Mac and Linux? If yes, than how many and it advisable to stretch the physical server and the VM Manager to its peak without putting it down?

    Reply
  3. Bruce says

    06/17/2019 at 7:46 am

    Is this applicable to VMware Fusion 11.x on macOS and VMs running 10.14.x? If so, can you point to any documentation on the usage of the serialNumber command line switch/argument? To be specific, where is that entered? Is the .vmx file launched via come method while inserting that switch?

    Reply
    • William Lam says

      06/17/2019 at 8:46 am

      Yes, this is applicable to both Fusion/vSphere. Simply power off the VM and open the .VMX file which you need to open .vmwarevm bundle

      Reply
  4. Phil says

    05/14/2020 at 9:56 pm

    Hey William, you can also use:
    hw.model.reflectHost = "TRUE"
    serialNumber.reflectHost = "TRUE"

    Reply

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Author

William Lam is a Senior Staff Solution Architect working in the VMware Cloud team within the Cloud Infrastructure Business Group (CIBG) at VMware. He focuses on Cloud Native technologies, Automation, Integration and Operation for the VMware Cloud based Software Defined Datacenters (SDDC)

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