Changing Mac Hardware UUID on a Parallels 11 VM
<p>I have a few VMs in Parallels 11, running several different versions of OS X, for automated software builds.</p>

<p>I recently copied those VMs to a different host, so I'd have a second set to fall back on in case of a hardware failure.</p>

<p>The problem: the copied VMs have the same Hardware UUIDs as the corresponding originals, and that causes a problem backing up the VMs with Time Machine, since Time Machine links backup images to machines by their Hardware UUIDs. If you have two VMs with the same Hardware UUID, Time Machine running in those two VMs will try to write to the same sparsebundle file on the backup server.</p>

<p>I googled the issue and found this: <a href="http://kb.parallels.com/en/11197" rel="nofollow">http://kb.parallels.com/en/11197</a> -- but those instructions don't work for Parallels 11: when you double-click the pvm, it is imported immediately, without asking whether it was moved or copied. When I <strong>first</strong> imported the copies, Parallels asked me whether the VMs were moved or copied, and I answered that they were copied. The KB article makes it sound like that should have made Parallels assign new Hardware UUIDs to the VMs, but that didn't happen (it did assign new MAC addresses, though).</p>

<p>I'm going to try finding the Hardware UUID in the PVM using a hex search; if I can find it, maybe I can change it manually, using a hex editor. It seems like a very yucky procedure, though, for something you'd think Parallels should handle itself. Is there any better way of doing this? Is this a bug in Parallels 11, or did they deliberately remove the Hardware UUID reset functionality (and if so, why)?</p>