vSphere PowerCLI for ESXi host build details

Posted By Jon on Sep 29, 2014 | 0 comments

I found these PowerCLI commands especially useful when doing an inventory of ESXi hosts:

get-view -ViewType HostSystem -Property Name,Config.Product | select Name,{$_.Config.Product.FullName}

get-view -ViewType HostSystem -Property Name,Config.Product | foreach {$_.Name, $_.Config.Product}

The first will output something like this:

PowerCLI C:\Program Files (x86)\VMware\Infrastructure\vSphere PowerCLI> get-view
-ViewType HostSystem -Property Name,Config.Product | select Name,{$_.Config.Pro
duct.FullName}

Name                                    $_.Config.Product.FullName
—-                                    ————————–
<hostnameremoved>                   VMware ESXi 5.1.0 build-799733
<hostnameremoved>                   VMware ESXi 5.1.0 build-799733
<hostnameremoved>                   VMware ESXi 5.1.0 build-799733
<hostnameremoved>                   VMware ESXi 5.1.0 build-799733
<hostnameremoved>                   VMware ESXi 5.1.0 build-799733
<hostnameremoved>                   VMware ESXi 5.1.0 build-799733
<hostnameremoved>                   VMware ESXi 5.1.0 build-799733
<hostnameremoved>                   VMware ESXi 5.1.0 build-799733

The second command would result in an output like this:

PowerCLI C:\Program Files (x86)\VMware\Infrastructure\vSphere PowerCLI> get-view
-ViewType HostSystem -Property Name,Config.Product | foreach {$_.Name, $_.Confi
g.Product}
hps1esx1.aecio.com

Name                  : VMware ESXi
FullName              : VMware ESXi 5.1.0 build-799733
Vendor                : VMware, Inc.
Version               : 5.1.0
Build                 : 799733
LocaleVersion         : INTL
LocaleBuild           : 000
OsType                : vmnix-x86
ProductLineId         : embeddedEsx
ApiType               : HostAgent
ApiVersion            : 5.1
InstanceUuid          :
LicenseProductName    : VMware ESX Server
LicenseProductVersion : 5.0
DynamicType           :
DynamicProperty       :

This is pretty useful as vSphere client will sometimes not show the full build version because of total number of characters:Hope this is useful!

Edit:  I also needed to grab the service tag from a host that is not managed by vCenter Server.  To do that we ssh’d to the host and ran the following:

[root@host name]#  /usr/sbin/dmidecode |grep -A4 “System Information”

Which resulted in dmidecode not being found, so the following command was used:

[root@host name]#  /sbin/esxcli hardware platform get

This resulted in the necessary output without having to do a physical check on the host!