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You are here: Home / Automation / Quick Tip - Preserving MachineGUID in Windows using vCenter Converter

Quick Tip - Preserving MachineGUID in Windows using vCenter Converter

05.15.2023 by William Lam // 7 Comments

When using the popular vCenter Converter tool for performing a Physical-to-Virtual (P2V) or Virtual-to-Virtual (V2V) migration of Microsoft Windows, the MachineGuid (HKLM->SOFTWARE->Microsoft->Cryptography->MachineGuid) can change based on your migration settings.


By default, the Reconfigure destination virtual machine option is selected to help ensure the converted virtual machine will properly start in the destination environment as outlined in the vCenter Converter documentation.


If you wish to preserve the MachineGuid, then you simply need to uncheck this box before starting the migration. For modern versions of Windows, this should not be a problem but if you are converting older releases, you should verify that converter workload will startup properly before utilizing this setting.

Furthermore, if you simply cloned a Windows VM in vSphere, the default behavior is to generate a new BIOS UUID which directly affects the MachineGUID. To prevent this behavior, you can add an additional VM Advanced Setting to "keep" the original BIOS UUID as outlined in VMware KB 1541 and this behavior is simliar to de-selecting the vCenter Converter setting based on my quick test.

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Categories // Automation, vSphere Tags // MachineGUID, vCenter Converter

Comments

  1. DavidN says

    05/15/2023 at 10:35 am

    Hi, would this also retain disk IDs (required for MSCS disks)?

    Reply
    • William Lam says

      05/15/2023 at 10:39 am

      Not sure, you'll have to try it out and see for your specific OS. For older OS, there's not been a way to globally identify disks, at least not in any reliable fashion. I think it was only in modern OSes that there's now a way via UUID but something you'll want to experiment with

      Reply
      • DavidN says

        05/15/2023 at 12:07 pm

        I think I will - cheers!

        Reply
        • William Lam says

          05/15/2023 at 12:16 pm

          Feel free to report back on your findings, especially for the version of operating systems

          Reply
          • DavidN says

            05/18/2023 at 4:55 am

            Hiya, I tried with 2003 64-bit - but it wouldn't start the VM after unchecking the re-configure box.

  2. Michael says

    05/15/2023 at 1:56 pm

    I have had problems with this in the past, including with Windows Server 2016, V2V from Hyper-V.
    The MachineGuid is contained in the file names under C:\ProgramData\Microsoft\Crypto\Keys.
    If the ID changes, Windows no longer finds the private keys of the certificates.

    In my opinion, the MachineGuid should not be changed in the default setting.

    Reply
  3. Caleb says

    05/15/2023 at 6:27 pm

    Dude you're a lifesaver! I'm in the middle of a HyperV to VMware project and the Machine keys resetting has caused so many issues! Especially with IIS servers. I will definitely be trying this out.

    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, Automation, Integration and Operation for the VMware Cloud based Software Defined Datacenters (SDDC) across Private, Hybrid and Public Cloud

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