How do I get the system-serial-number for Xen Server?

Question

I would like to find out how could I be able to retrieve the system-serial-number of virtual machines installed on Citrix XenServer. I had referred to https://stackoverflow.com/questions/15802876/how-to-get-unique-id-of-a-citrix-xenserver-vm-from-the-guest-os?s=1|1.0838 but still could not get with the given solution in this post.

I am able to get the system-serial-number for the virtual machines install on vSphere Client using

Example:

   $ dmidecode -t 1 | grep -i serial
        Serial Number: VMware-xx xx xx xx xx xx xx xx-xx xx xx xx xx xx xx xx

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The virtual machines were running on RHEL 6.5 (for both Xen and vSphere). When the same command was being executed to retrieve the serial number on the Citrix XenServer VM, the below error messages will be displayed:

   $ dmidecode -t 1 | grep -i serial
     # dmidecode 2.12
     # No SMBIOS nor DMI entry point found, sorry.

Had also tried the below command on the Xen Server, it does not work too.

   $ lshal | grep -i serial

Answer 1

On VMware, both serial numbers and system UUID returns equivalent values. Exemple:

Serial Number: VMware-56 4d 36 0a d3 df f6 ad-8c 21 07 c2 4d 58 d6 42
UUID: 564D360A-D3DF-F6AD-8C21-07C24D58D642

Basically the serial number is the UUID (with some extra spaces) prefixed with VMware.

There is a standard and easy way to get the system UUID which works on VMware and VirtualBox (and maybe other hypervisors):

# dmidecode -s system-uuid
564D360A-D3DF-F6AD-8C21-07C24D58D642

Hope this helps.