VMs with identical MAC addresses

[shanw4]

I have multiple vCenter servers sync'ing without issue, however we've cloned a few VMs from one vCenter location to another, and in doing so these VMs have the same MAC address. When performing the netbox-sync, I can see that rather than creating a new object, it's updating an existing, and therefore we only have one virtual machine asset in our inventory rather than two.

Is this intended behaviour as I can see netbox can handle virtual machines with identical MAC addresses?

[shanw4]

I saw the host nic exclude by mac list however this doesn't appear to resolve our vm duplicate mac addresses.

[bb-Ricardo]

Hi, which version of net box-sync do you use. Just recently I added the lookup by VM UUID instead of MAC addresses. Maybe this solves your issue.

[shanw4]

running v1.80

[bb-Ricardo]

Can you check somehow the UUID of the one VM and the cloned VM in the other vCenter? Do they have same MAC addresses snd tge same UUID?

[shanw4]

Confirming the VMs have the same UUID across both vCenter servers.

[shanw4]

I can see this is also having issues with our backup environment now, so I don't believe it's necessary to fix. I'm going to likely clone and power the duplicate UUID VM down. Thanks for your help!

[bb-Ricardo]

Great that you could find the root cause. The problem is more likely based in the VMware copy process. UUID (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Universally_unique_identifier), hence the name, is meant to be a universal unique identifier. But here it's the same which causes the issue.