Mass Machine_id Duplication

If you are using Uyuni to manage virtual machines, you might find it useful to create clones of your VMs. A clone is a VM that uses a primary disk that is an exact copy of an existing disk.

While cloning VMs can save you a lot of time, the duplicated identifying information on the disk can sometimes cause problems.

If you try to register two machine where one is the clone of the other, you probably want Uyuni to register them as two separate clients. However, if the machine ID in both the original client and the clone is the same, Uyuni registers both clients as one system, and the data is overwritten one the second machine is registered.

This can be resolved by changing the machine ID of the clone, so that Uyuni recognizes them as two different clients. For more information and instructions on how to change machine ID, see Troubleshooting Registering Cloned Clients.

However, in some situations, it is neither feasible nor practical to change the machine ID on all systems, as this could disrupt other applications that depend on the existing machine IDs. In those cases, a option is available where a fake machine ID is generated to be used in the context of Uyuni.