All 0s UUID, PernixData and the AMIDEDOS Fix

Let me start off by saying this isn’t an issue directly with PernixData FVP.  This is a subsequent issue with PernixData FVP caused by Supermicro not putting a UUID on the motherboards I bought. Two problems for the price of one.

I ran across an issue with the three whitebox Supermicro boards that I purchased for my home lab. I was attempting to install PernixData FVP on them to do some testing, when I ran across a strange issue. After I installed the host extension VIB on all my machines, only one of them would show up in the PernixData tab in vCenter. And when I would reboot them or uninstall the host extension, one of the other ones would show up.

Given that it’s a simple VIB install command, I didn’t figure it was anything to do with the installation itself but I uninstalled it anyway and by uninstalling and paying very close attention, I found my issue right away. The host UUID of the system was all 0s.

I opened up the ‘prnxcli’ on one of my other hosts and verified my guess. As you can see, both UUIDs are all 0s. This was playing hell with the FVP Management server and my guess is it didn’t know which host was which.

I did some quick searching and found this KB article discussing the issue, but it didn’t give me much in the way of how to fix the problem other than to contact the manufacturer. Given that the system is running an American Megatrends Inc, BIOS, I did some quick searching around and found a utility that will auto generate a UUID and hopefully resolve the issue. Finding the download was kind of a pain so I improvised after I found a link to a Lenovo posting and then I found it on the Lenovo driver site. All you need is the AMIDEDOS.EXE file, nothing more so you can get it from the following BIOS download.   Just download this file and extract the executable. I put it on a DOS USB key that I formatted using Rufus.

Then I just booted up my host to the USB key and ran the following command:

 amidedos.exe /su auto

According to the instruction file, this will auto generate a new UUID for the system. You should see a screen similar after it performs the change.

I went ahead and booted up my host to see if the change took affect and it looks like it did!

I went ahead and changed the UUID on the other two hosts and booted them all back up. When I got into vCenter, I noticed that the PernixData Management Server was still seeing strange SSDs from my hosts. I removed all three hosts from vCenter and re-added them, restarted the PernixData Management Server and now magically all the host SSDs showed up correctly when I went to add them to the Flash Cluster.

All in all, this was a perfect storm which I seem very good at creating from time to time. As much as I cursed trying to figure it out at first, it was fun learning about something I’ve never ran across.