How to distinguish a VM from its clone for software licensing?

[netlib]

Is there any way to distinguish a VM from a direct clone for licensing purposes? It obviously has the same hardware info like MAC address, IP address, disk drive info, etc. I can't imagine we are the only ones running into this problem. Thanks.

[ProPenguin]

Actually from what I have noticed on my cloned VMs, the MAC addresses are different.

[AntonVZhbankov]

MAC address can be identical if you want.

No way actually to distinguish which machine is it - original or cloned.

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MCSA, MCTS Hyper-V, VCP 3/4, VMware vExpert

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[netlib]

Does VMWare have any APIs that I can call from inside the Guest OS that return things like the name of the folder containing the VMHD files?

[RParker]

No way actually to distinguish which machine is it - original or cloned.

Not true ALL hard drives have a unique signature, GUID? That's how you can tell them apart... In Windows if you do a chkdsk it will give you this info. That's about the only way...

[netlib]

Not true ALL hard drives have a unique signature, GUID? That's how you can tell them apart... In Windows if you do a chkdsk it will give you this info. That's about the only way...

Are you referring to the drive serial number? That is easily changed. If not, which GUID are you referring to and which Windows API do I use to query it? Thanks.