The RHEL Virtualization Windows team found in https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=2035636 that older Windows versions (like, 8.1) can crash if a Virtual Disk does not provide a serial attribute.

While the crash itself is not a problem given 8.1 is EOL and it does not happen in newer versions, they found that Microsoft recommends the disks to have Serial, see Comment 11.

This RFE is to request that newly created Windows guests get a serial set on the disks by default.

Reading through https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows-hardware/drivers/storage/device-unique-identifiers-duids-for-storage-devices it appears it can help with proper device enumeration if the disk address changes. We also recommend customers to use disk serial or fs UUID on Linux VMs in fstab for similar reasons.