Recently I partnered up with UniTrends to get deeper knowledge of their backup solution. They were so nice to lend me a license so I can play around in my demo lab. Now a demo lab usually isn’t the best hardware around, and so ain’t mine. I immediately ran into an error trying to import my vCenter server. Something about both ESX hosts sharing the same UUID.

The link UniTrends provided basically said contact your hardware vendor. I think that’s the proper response, however Shuttle isn’t really in the HCL of VMWare, and I assume they don’t have any knowledge how VMWare would like to see the UUID. You can check your UUID by SSH-ing into ESX and type esxcfg-info | grep “BIOS UUID” It will show something like 0x3 0x0 0x2 0x0 0x4 0x0 0x5 0x0 0x0 0x6 0x0 0x7 0x0 0x8 0x0 0x9 which actually means 03000200-0400-0500-0006-000700080009. You can compare the UUID on both your ESX nodes. They will probably match (else UniTrends woudn’t have said so 😉 )

So how to change it. It’s set by the BIOS.

Download Rufus and download Freedos ISO . You also need to download AMIDMI.EXE . Create a bootable USB stick with Rufus. Make sure you select Create a bootable disk using Freedos . Copy AMIDMI.exe to your stick and boot your ESX host with it.

When booted in Freedos use the amidmi /u command. It will configure another UUID. Reboot ESX and have fun using UniTrends.