Generate New SID in Server 2012

Many of today’s Enterprise datacenters are running some form of virtualization. Server virtualization allows us to clone VMs. When it comes to Server 2012, the cloned VM with Server 2012 has duplicate copy of SID of machine from which it was cloned. The duplicate SID value causes lot of issues so each machine must have unique SID value. In this post, I will show steps to generate new SID in Server 2012 R2.

Generate New SID in Server 2012

Log on to Windows Server. Open Windows Explorer, and browse, C:\Windows\System32\Sysprep

Right-click sysprep application and click Run as Administrator.

System Preparation tool will open as shown below. Choose Enter System Out-of-Box Experience (OOBE) option, check Generalize option, choose Reboot as shutdown options and click OK.

The application will generate new SID and perform all the required actions and will reboot.

After the reboot, you will be asked to enter the product key (optional), accept License terms, and enter new Administrator password. You can then, login to the server and change Host name and IP address. In this way you can generate new SID.