After trying to create a .vmdk-file of a physical USB mass storage device (= USB drive) and emulate it as VM USB drive I realized that VMware is setting a new random serial number to the emulated USB drive on every restart of the VM. See this thread: Re: Virtualizing a physical USB (boot) drive
In order to set a fixed serial number, I tried to set an UUID to the corresponding .vmdk-file within ESXi by copying it to the ESXi datastorage and executing:
vmkfstools -J setuuid usb_image.vmdk
Unfortunately it returns the following error:
DiskLib_SetUUID() failed for disk usb_image.vmdk: Failed to lock the file (16392).
Do you have any idea how I can fix this or is there another way setting a fixed serial number to an emulated physical USB drive?