BE2012 Convert to Virtual - retain VM GUID?

[Hydrofarm]

I am successfully using the Convert functionality in BE2012 to make Hyper-V copies of the last remaining non-VM servers in my rack.  I am running into an issue however in dealing with the replicated VM because it appears that when BE overwrites the VM copy with a new version (I run the backup job weekly) it is assigned a *new* virtual machine ID.  

This doesn't cause an issue for BE but I use another VM-management application that fails every week because from its perspective the VM just disappeared.  I have to manually re-associate the "new" VM that BE creates.

Any suggestions for how I might retain the same VM ID while having BE conveniently create an updated VM image every week?

[Colin_Weaver]

I believe our process is

If VM does not exist, create new VM, then an empty snapshot of that VM to restore/convert into, then do the restore/convert and make the snapshot active

OR

If VM does exists, delete VM, create new VM as before.

Now as it is just a create new command for both options VMware itself will see always see this as a new machine and therefore always create a new guid. As such I don't think there is any option currently in Backup Exec to achieve what you have asked for. There probably isn't anything on the VMware side either as it would have to somehow maintain a record of hostnames to reserve against assigned guids. 

I guess a nice option would be: 

if machine aready exists create an empty snapshot and restore/convert into it. However this might need modifications to both Backup Exec and the VMware supplied Backup API.

As such it sounds like an enhancement so would suggest you submit an Ideas request using the create --> idea option at the top of these forum pages.