Change Serial Number and Asset Tags for Hyper-V VMs

Overview

When restoring a  Hyper-V VM from a backup, in some cases the hardware IDs won't be recovered with it.

This will usually cause programs to fail their activation and need re-activation. In certain cases the applications installed may be outside of vendor support so the only way to get them working again is to change the hardware IDs back to what they were before.

From Hyper-V 2016 onwards, a text format XML file is no longer used to store hardware IDs and instead is replaced by a binary VMCX file. Although harder to edit it can still be done

Altaro Advanced Settings Editor for Hyper-V

Altaro have a great tool which can be used to view and edit the hardware IDs. This can be downloaded from: https://www.altaro.com/hyper-v/free-tool-advanced-settings-editor-hyper-v-virtual-machines/