Every guest VM has an internal name. The host uses the internal name to identify the guest VMs. CloudStack gives you an option to provide a guest VM with a display name. You can set this display name as the internal name so that the vCenter can use it to identify the guest VM. A new global parameter, vm.instancename.flag, has now been added to achieve this functionality.

The default format of the internal name is i-<user_id>-<vm_id>-<instance.name>, where instance.name is a global parameter. However, If vm.instancename.flag is set to true, and if a display name is provided during the creation of a guest VM, the display name is appended to the internal name of the guest VM on the host. This makes the internal name format as i-<user_id>-<vm_id>-<displayName>. The default value of vm.instancename.flag is set to false. This feature is intended to make the correlation between instance names and internal names easier in large data center deployments.

The following table explains how a VM name is displayed in different scenarios.