Duplicate UUID for vm servers

[Robert Yung]

We have some windows VMs that are being grouped together into one HP SIM entry, which is evident by that enty containing multiple ip addresses.

It seems that the issue is to due to the generated UUID being the same for all these servers. If I delete the entry and do a discovery on one of the affect servers by ip address, the resulting entry will have a particular UUID. If I delete it and do a discovery on another affected ip, the same UUID will come up again.

I've heard that the UUID is generated from the bios serial number and it is true that these servers somehow have the same serial number. So I manually changed the bios serial numbers for these VMs to be unique and a single-server discovery does confirm this but yet the generated UUID is still the same. I also confirmed by running this on the all these servers:

wmic bios get serialnumber

I read that the UUID may be now based on MAC address but I have confirmed that the MAC addresses of these servers are different.

If I change the discovery credentials so it can't login to the servers, then the servers do come up as being different, though the lack of login-access severly limits the details of those entries.

Can someone shed some light on how UUIDs for VMs are generated? The VMs don't even have any HP  agents installed and so there are no UUID-related registry settings to delete.

HP SIM is 6.3 with the latest hotfixes (up to hotfix 15). For testing, I tried the latest HP 7.3 and it had the same issue with these servers.

Thanks,

Robert