Quick change of Hyper-V UID – for Register in place VM
If you want to quickly create copies of one Hyper-V Virtual Machine, here is an easy process:
1) change the XML UID by editing the XML file within the Exported VM directory.
2) change the name to the new machine name (this is the
3) change the global_id
4) change the logical_id (to the new global ID)
5) save the file
6) rename the XML file to match the global ID
7) import – register in place (use the existing unique ID)
8) adjust any settings on the VM
9) start the VM
This was a helpful resource as I was looking to stand up a testing environment from clones of our production VMs. We used SAN based snapshots to create zero-copy clones of the necessary VM volumes and wanted a way to quickly bring the VM copies into Hyper-V. This method worked but I realized it wouldn’t work in the future as MS is changing the VM config file from XML to binary in Server 2016. In light of that I found a solution that doesn’t seem to be well documented, the PowerShell Hyper-V cmdlet Compare-VM. It allows an existing VM config to be copied and manipulated, and is supported in Server 2016.
Nice – simple and works!