VM Restore Changing UUID?

[lewisdrummond]

I just did a VM restore (for the first time actually) on v5 and while it worked, I wasn't able to log on to the domain. It said the the computer account might not exist. Does restoring a VM change its UUID?

Lewis

[tsightler]

No, the UUID does not change. However, by default, Windows systems newer than Windows 2000 automatically change the computer account password every 30 days. If you restored a backup from yesterday, and the system had changed it's account password last night just after the backup, then the restored system will no longer be able to use the computer account. Obviously the older the backup of the system you restore, the more likely this is to happen (a 15 day old backup has a 50% change of having changed it's password in those 15 days).

You can control, and even disable, this behavior, but it's not suggested to disable it. Here's a pretty authoritative resource:

http://blogs.technet.com/b/askds/archiv ... test2.aspx

It's usually pretty easy to simply disjoin/rejoin the domain.

[lewisdrummond]

Interesting, I did not know that.