Setting hard drive serial number

[alatteri]

Hello,

I need to virtualize some severs which the software is licensed to the hard drive serial number. I know this is possible with plain qemu+kvm, but I do not see any documentation regarding this in Proxmox and the VM conf files see to have a different non XML format than plain qemu+kvm.

Thanks for any help.

Alan

 

[wolfgang]

Hi,
you can do this in the config file with args.

Only for Notes: XML is used by libvirt and not by KVM or QEMU!

See: https://pve.proxmox.com/wiki/Manual:_vm.conf
for the QEMU+KVM comand see man kvm.

 

[m.ardito]

...sorry, where in that page can I find about setting a disk serial number? smbios has an option, but disks?

Thanks
Marco

 

[wolfgang]

args is only for plain KVM commands.
the comands you see at: man kvm

Use:

# qm showcmd <VM-number>

this shows your run qemu-kvm command.

in this output you must search for something like this.
-drive file:<path to your Disk> .... -<something>
this you must copy to your conf.

please backup your config before you edit the file.

args: <copy>,serial=<your_needed_serial>

and command out the standard entry about this drive

I hope you understand my description.

 

[alatteri]

I got this working using the args: But really, it would be great to be able to set this a Proxmox way in the gui. Because install of just serial=' ABCD1234'
the args become this:

-device ahci,id=ahci0,multifunction=on,bus=pci.0,addr=0x7 -drive file=/var/lib/vz/images/100/vm-100-disk-1.qcow2,if=none,id=drive-sata0,format=qcow2,aio=native,cache=none,detect-zeroes=on -device ide-drive,bus=ahci0.0,drive=drive-sata0,id=sata0,bootindex=100,serial=' ABCD1234'


Also this prevents easy cloning from the GUI, as the in the clone, the whole arg is taken, and it doesn't actually clone the drive. So cloning basically becomes a manual shell process.

Thanks.
Alan

 

[jeffwadsworth]

A simpler way is just to add the serial=1234 or whatever to the .conf file for your VM. Make sure you power cycle (not a simple reboot) the VM to reset the value.

Example:

bootdisk: virtio0
cores: 1
ide0: VMStorage:101/vm-101-disk-2.qcow2,cache=writethrough,size=50G,serial=1234
ide1: VMStorage:101/vm-101-disk-1.qcow2,cache=writethrough,size=50G,serial=12345
ide2: VMStorage:iso/Windows2008_Standard.iso,media=cdrom
memory: 1024
name: Win2008FirstServer
net0: bridge=vmbr0,e1000=66:61:40:33:66:64
numa: 0
ostype: win8
parent: test
smbios1: uuid=4286957f-21c6-461f-b7b0-8aa4247e3cba
sockets: 1

 

[alatteri]

That is a new convention in proxmox 4.

 

[LnxBil]

I stumbled on this problem too. I think we need this in general in Proxmox for virtualizing.
Same applies to smbios entries with spaces (not allowed via GUI) and have to be encapsulated with ' and also applying SLIC via GUI would also be great.

 

[JayTaylorMN]

Is there a way to do this for containers?

Thanks,
Jay

 

[LnxBil]

There is no harddisk abstraction for a container. It only 'sees' the data - file storage.

You can, however, attach a physical disk to a container, so the data is directly accessible (also serial).

 

[zeatheboden]

"Holy Thread Necro Batman!" -- Leaving this note here for anyone else running into a similar issue since this is a high hit on Le Googles for vm virtio disk serial numbers.

(Please don't judge me for the aged infra versions here)

I spent the better part of 30+ minutes trying to figure out why serial={{ some guid }} in ProxMox 6.4-15 on my VM's SCSI harddrive wasn't being passed into my Alpine 3.16 guest OS. After scouring dmesg, lsblk output, etc -- I found that there appears to be something wonky with mdev on Alpine.

Booting up to a bootable linux distro with udev, the lsblk output gave serial numbers just fine.... so keep your Debian/Ubuntu/Kali live cd iso handy if you're using Alpine or a similar busybox'd distro.

I'm in the slow process of stepped upgrading my clustered proxmox install to get to a more respectable set of software versions.