Migrating CentOS VM between Hyper-V Clusters

Question

Hi all, wondering if anyone can help. We have a CentOS 7 VM running on Hyper-V. It's a Generation 2 VM and we need to migrate it from a Windows 2012 R2 cluster to a Windows 2016 one.

To migrate the VM I powered the VM down, used the Export facility in Hyper-V to copy it from the 2012 R2 cluster to the 2016 one, used the import facility on the 2016 cluster, with the option to 'Register the virtual machine in place (use the existing unique ID)' and then powered it on. The VM boots fine and you can log in, but when you check under /sys/class/dmi/id the product_uuid file is not there. From my understanding this file is generated automatically on system startup and can't be manually created.

Unfortunately, the software that runs on the VM is licensed against the product_uuid and without the file, the software won't run.

Reversing the process (exporting from the 2016 Cluster and importing it back onto the 2012 R2 one) and then powering it on, restores the VMs ability to generate the product_uuid file. So I'm guessing that it is something in the Hypervisor version that is causing the issue as opposed to the migration process being used. Needless to say having the VM on the 2012 R2 cluster isn't ideal, we want to decommission it.

Both Hyper-V clusters have the same underlying hardware - same processors and network cards - the only difference being the hosts in the 2016 cluster have twice the amount of RAM present.

Short of creating a new VM on the 2016 cluster and reinstalling/relicensing the software, is there any way I can get this file to generate? I don't want to have to go through this every time we perform an upgrade to the underlying hypervisor.

As a side note, we also have a CentOS VM that is a Generation 1 machine and this migrated successfully using the above method.

Any help would be greatly appreciated.

Answer 1

Hello

Thank you for your question and reaching out. I can understand you are having issues related to CentOS VM Migrated to 2016 Cluster.

In my personal view I will prefer to use Generation 1 VM for non-Microsoft Operating systems.

In your case after you moved to 2016 Cluster , please try Update its Integration Services and also try to Update VM configuration version by Right Click of VM - > Select Update Configuration.

If its still not working Try to create new Gen2 CentOS VM and attached Imported VM's .vhdx file to this newly created VM.

https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows-server/virtualization/hyper-v/deploy/upgrade-virtual-machine-version-in-hyper-v-on-windows-or-windows-server

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