Restore vmware VM with original unique ID

Yes, and this will happen by default as long as the original machine is gone. If you restore a copy of the VM and the original still exists, a new UUID will have to be generated as duplicates are not allowed. Most customers ‘keep’ the original VM when restoring a new one, at least temporarily until they are confident that its safe to delete the old one, so just keep that in mind. One way around this is to clone the original VM, then delete the original to free up the incoming UUID for the restored machine.

Thanks. Will the UUID be retained in case of unconditional overwrite as well or the original VM needs to be deleted first?

Hi,

On doing a full VM in-place restore with unconditional overwrite will retain original uuid as it uses CBT based restore and same on non-cbt based full vm restore with unconditional overwrite. When source VM is present on the same host/cluster, restored VM will get new uuid on doing to out of place restore with different vm name, to avoid id collisions.

Regards

Gopinath

Thank you. But the two statements appear to be conflicting. Overwrite implies Source VM is present.

So are you saying overwrite will retain the uuid as per your first statement or a new uuid will be generated as per your second statement?

Perfect, thanks

What’s interesting with overwrite is that it will attempt a CBT restore. So it keeps the VM where it is and only restores the blocks on the destination which are different from the backup. This can improve restore time dramatically for large VMs.