VM Use Case from a new VM user (Searched Forums + YouTube)

[scottgus1]

It's been a while since I did a clone, sorry about my definiteness. It is apparently true that hardware UUIDs can be preserved. These UUIDS are the ones that are used to determine activation. However, the Virtualbox UUIDs must change, since no two VMs or disk files on the same host PC can have the same UUID.

[BigBoomer]

I also found a command to manually set the UUID of a VM in an earlier version of virtualbox, wonder if it still works. Anyway, this is far less important, just a curiosity. I am just glad I can preserve the UUID in the clone. : ) Thanks for all your help.

I feel like this thread can be closed as you guys were very helpful and answered all my questions or helped direct me to answers.

-BigBoomer

[mpack]

I also found a command to manually set the UUID of a VM in an earlier version of virtualbox

Be careful.

A VM uses many different UUIDs for many different purposes. The most common discussions hereabouts will have been about changing the UUID in a disk image, which is not the same as the VM UUID. Typically the OPs in those topics had deleted a snapshot and hoped to repair the damage by hacking the disk UUID to get around the "disk with UUID xxxx missing" error.

A VM may include several disks, especially if you count snapshots separately, and therefore several disk UUIDs. But it only has one VM UUID which is the unique and permanent name VirtualBox gives to the VM on creation. There is also a motherboard (hardware) UUID which is what the guest OS sees. The latter defaults to being the same as the VM UUID, but it can be changed: the VM cloning dialog now offers this change I believe.

[BigBoomer]

Oh ok... Good to know. I just saw that the format fit the UUID standards so I made an assumption. Thank you I will check that assumption moving forward.