UUID issue with esx inventory

[Ashwin89]

What unique identifier we should use to identify each virtual machine. Even two VM's can have same UUID the same esx server or in a virtual center.

-AsHWin

[lamw]

I would recommending using either the managed object reference ID or using the instanceUuid which is suppose to be a unique uuid for a given vCenter instance. afaik, this value should be unique*. The MoRef ID will definitely be unique, but it may change depending on the operations you perform, so I would maybe keep a hash table mapping of the VM's displayName + MoRef ID as one way to uniquely identify a VM or use the instanceUuid

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William Lam

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[stumpr]

vSphere 4.0 added the instanceUuid.

InstanceUuid

VirtualCenter-specific 128-bit UUID of a virtual machine, represented as a hexademical string. This identifier is used by VirtualCenter to uniquely identify all virtual machine instances, including those that may share the same SMBIOS UUID.

Since vSphere API 4.0