vCenter: How to move VM and preserve all hardware identifiers?

[DmitryBond]

Hi.

We have lost internet connectivity in one of our offices (Denmark) but we need to keep people able to work.

So, we decided to move some of our critical VMs to other location.

We have saved some of VMs to HDD and sent it to England. We installed VMs on a server with vCenter 4.1.0,491557.

But(!) we have faced a problem - some critical software lost its activation and now it is reporting "evaluation period ended".

Unfrtunately, we cannot activate it again because software vendor is no longer supports it. 😞

So, at the moment moved VM is almost useless for us - we cannot work.

The question is - could you recommend any special methods/options to move VM  from one vCenter Server to another and preserve all hardware identifiers, so to aviod such software activation loss?

Regards,
Dmitry.

[iw123]

Normally, when it comes to licensing in the guest, the only hardware identifiers that may cause an issue will be MAC address, IP address and Disk Identifier, each of which can be changed.

See link below:

http://www.windowsitpro.com/article/file-systems/how-can-i-change-the-volume-id-of-a-disk-

The MAC can be changed in the VM settings for the guest in the VI Client.

If you are running the VM in England now, so therefore on a different subnet?, then you will have changed the IP. This could well be the issue.

[beckham007fifa]

few applications are licensed binded but yet there is some possibilty to regain it and it should be coming from the application team who are expert for the application but I am not sure if you have hardware change along with the ip the MAC address changes would be possible because diff nics have diff algorithm for the mac addresses.

[DmitryBond]

Thank you for good ideas.

But our system administrator reported that he cannot change MAC address of VM in England because "it is not accept 9F as valid value".

The original MAC address of VM is = 00-50-56-9F-12-05.

So, our system administrator cannot set the same MAC address for the moved VM.

Can you see any rasons - why that could be? And what could we do?

[DmitryBond]

Finally our admin changed MAC address in some "other way" and now it is working.

Thank you.