gwmi is short for Get-WMIObject, Win32_ComputerSystem is being given to the positional ClassName parameter, select is an alias for Select-Object, and UUID is being supplied to the positional Property parameter. I used short-hand aliases since this is something you’re typing interactively. If you want to see what a computer’s UUID is, open an elevated PowerShell prompt and run the following (this works on any Windows computer, whether virtual or physical): gwmi Win32_ComputerSystem | select UUID If you’re here, you likely already know the reason that you care about it, so I’m not going to spend a lot of time on that particular topic. I know that it is used when you attempt to PXE boot a computer. The particular field that this script modifies (VM BIOS GUID) is also known as the system’s UUID (universally unique identifier). This post includes a free script that easily modifies the BIOS GUID of a virtual machine. All of these situations can be avoided by using Hyper-V’s export and import functionality, but, things happen. Sometimes, items are duplicated that should be unique. Nothing is truly unique, either, as duplicates can be made through simple file copy operations. For virtual machines, almost nothing is constant.

For a physical machine, it’s expected that these numbers will be constants. These functions will generally rely on various signatures presented by hardware components.

Several computing functions require the ability to uniquely identify a computer.

Hp dmi tool uuid