It appears that ESX (and for that matter most Linux systems) do not return some hardeware information including the serial number. I can see on the very few SuSe linux V11, this information is available. Is this a function of the particular version of Linux and ESX we are running? THe ESX servers are at ESXi4.1.0, using vCenter credentials.

Thanks in advance

It is certainly the case for Linux that discovering some information requires privilege elevation.

See our online documentation , under the Linux section.
I believe that you need to define either PRIV_DMIDECODE or PRIV_HWINFO (or both).

How to do that is described here.

You should find that ADDM 8.3 and its updated discovery scripts is better at recovering serial numbers on Linux.

Andrew, Actually, I noticed this when using vCenter credentials in ADDM 8.3 to access ESXi hosts. We are not using UNIX credentials to access the ESX hosts. There was no serial number returned, and we think this is an important item to have especially when creating CIs for the CMDB. Is this a function of the vCenter access? or something that ESXi does noes not provide? THanks for your help

According to ‘Administration/platforms/VMEareESX’ we should be able to get this information.
getHostInfo* HostSystem hardware.memorySize
hardware.systemInfo.model Not used if unset
hardware.systemInfo.vendor Not used if unset
hardware.systemInfo.uuid
hardware.systemInfo.otherIdentifyingInfo[].identifierType.key Not used if unset
hardware.systemInfo.otherIdentifyingInfo[].identifierValue Not used if unset or “unknown”
hardware.cpuPkg.threadId
hardware.cpuPkg.numCpuCores
hardware.cpuInfo.threadId
config.hyperThread.active
config.network.dnsConfig.dnsDomainName Not used if unset
config.network.dnsConfig.hostName

But, in the right hand column, there is a note that says ‘not used of unset’. What is unset? and how do you set ‘it’?

Still, it appears that the hardware.systemInfo.model retrieves ALL of the system information except the serial number.

Thanks again for your help.

Mark Verplaetse 3 - 14 November 2011 03:37 PM

But, in the right hand column, there is a note that says ‘not used of unset’. What is unset? and how do you set ‘it’?

We mean that there is no value in the data when we request it from the VMware api. It seems that not all systems set it.

Note that prior to vSphere 5, the serial number was only available via the API for hosts manufactured by Dell – so you will only get a serial number for Dell hosts discovered via vSphere/vCenter. Unfortunately, even for vSphere 5 ADDM will still only get the serial of Dell hosts – this is because it wasn’t obvious at the time of development that the property that was returned by the API would be a valid serial number for other vendor’s hosts (because it wasn’t set to anything on non-Dell hosts, and vSphere 5 wasn’t yet available).

The fix to VMware’s vSphere API is mentioned here under “Resolved Issues”.

I’m going to reopen this thread here as I am still not getting ESX serial numbers even though both the ESX server ANS the vCenter instance are at V5.0 or better.

Here is the ESX host information from getHostInfo, notice that there is no serial number.

Also, here is the vCenter Software instance, it is at V5.0 also

Any help would be appreciated.

As mentioned here ADDM 8.3 and ADDM 8.3 SP1 will not generally return serial numbers via vSphere. I have seen it work on some Dell machines.

You could try the ADDM 8.3 SP2 pre-release to see if you get serial numbers. I have seen it return serial numbers for non-Dell machine.

As ever with a pre-release, just because a feature is in a pre-release does not mean it will make it into a released ADDM version.

We have noticed that we’ve managed to discover the Serial Number of one of our ESXi hosts using a vCentre credential. Interestingly, it is exactly the same Make (HP), Model (ProLiant BL490c G7) & ESXi version (4.1.0 433742) as the other ESXi hosts which we are not getting Serial Number info back for. Not exactly sure why this might be, but guessing some kind of additional configuration on the host?

I noticed that the Serial Number of the Host in question is displayed under the ‘Configuration’ tab within vCentre, whereas this is not displayed under this tab for hosts which we cannot discover Serial Number info for. However, I did notice that the Serial Number for all hosts appears to be displayed under the ‘Hardware Status’ tab (see attached image). I am not sure how exactly the data in this tab is populated, but I wondered if the vSphere discovery objects & properties for the VMware ESXi Discovery Platform could be changed to check the ‘Hardware Status’ tab to obtain the Serial Number?

Hi Mark. You have echoed my sentiments exactly. I have had a problem open with BMC on this issue for quite some time. ISS03910486

apparently, the vCenter API obtains the serial number from the field defined as ‘service tag’. sometimes this field is populated and sometimes it is not. We have a bunch of EDX V4.1 and V5.0 servers that are set up EXACTLY the same, and we have found that the ‘service tag’ field is not populated on a good portion of them. This could be a defect in vmware or something skipped in the installation but I find that hard to believe since they were done at the same time and exactly the same way.

That being said, the ‘Hardware Status’ tab on the vCenter console always has the serial number in it. This tells me that ADDM is obtaining the serial number from the wrong place. BTW, I understand that ssh login to the ESX host will retrieve the serial number. That, of course is not practical since we have the API. However, what good is discovery of the ESX hardware with out the Serial Number?

Unfortunately, I’m afraid this issue may become a finger pointing exercise between VMware and BMC. The API doesn’t return the Serial number if it is not in the ‘Service tag’ field, yet we don’t know how that field gets populated. On top of that, in the vCenter console, there it is on the ‘hardware status’ tab for everyone to see.

Here is the last communique I received on the problem: We are researching contacts with VMware to progress this.

There has been no progress. perhaps you can open another problem as this is clearly a bug. Discovery of ESX assets is pretty much useless with out the serial number.

Respectfully and frustrated.

We have the exact same issue.
I will open a case as well.

Just to confirm that I have opened a case for this with Support too.

I want to hopefully clear up any confusion around how ADDM retrieves ESXi serial numbers using the vSphere API (either when talking directly to the ESX/ESXi host or via a vCenter instance)

According to the link that Roland provided (above), the serial number isn’t reliably exposed in previous versions of the vSphere API so we can generally only retrieve the serial number from ESXi 5.0.0 servers (if you are using vCenter for discovery then this must also be 5.0 or later but that is required to managed ESXi 5.0.0 servers in any case). We have seen the serial number retrieved on some Dell servers running ESXi 4.0/4.1 so you may see that but this is the exception not the rule.

As described in the VMware release notes, ADDM looks at the HostSystemIdentificationInfo structures for the serial number. In fact we will retrieve all the values defined there if they are “set” – by “set” we mean the value is not empty or the string “unknown” as those aren’t useful values. These values are all stored as attributes on the recovered HostInfo. We specifically process a value called “ServiceTag” to be the serial number (the “serial” attribute), nothing else is renamed. We do this as both Dell and HP hardware report the serial number in the “ServiceTag” value (there appears to be no documented standard for these names)

So, assuming that the “ServiceTag” value is present in the HostSystemIdentificationInfo and the value is not empty or “unknown” then ADDM should report the serial number of the ESX server. You can confirm whether this value is present by looking at the “Configuration” tab for the server in the vSphere client UI – the HostSystemIdentificationInfo values are listed towards the bottom (values like “Service Tag”, “Asset Tag” and so on)

One potential confusion is that the vSphere client UI will often display a serial number under the “Hardware Status” tab. This value does not seem to come from the HostSystemIdentificationInfo structure – in fact it’s not clear where is comes from at all and appears to be some internal magic! If anyone can point me at some documentation on how we can obtain this value I would love to know how the vSphere client does this

To hopefully illustrate how all this looks I’ve attached a few screenshots:

mob.jpg – how the data appears in the vSphere API (using the vSphere Managed Object Browser). This is example of the data from a vCenter 5.0 instance but the ESXi host looks identical. As you can see there are two values shown, “OemSpecificString” with the value “Product ID: 432195-421” and “ServiceTag” with the value “CZC8091FPP”. There is also an “AssetTag” value which “unknown” (not shown, ADDM will ignore this entry)

client.png – how the data appears on the “Configuration” tab of the vSphere client UI.

vCenter.jpg – how the data appears in the ADDM HostInfo object when the server is discovered via vCenter. The “ServiceTag” value has be put in the “serial” attribute (label “Serial Number”) while the “OemSpecificString” value has been stored in an attribute with the same name (the UI has tried to be clever and labelled this “Oem Specific String”)

vSphere.jpg – the same data in ADDM when the server is discovered directly using the vSphere API.

If the ServiceTag value is present in HostSystemIdentificationInfo in the Managed Object Browser or the “Configuration” tab of the vSphere UI then ADDM should be retrieving it. If the value is not present and the ESX version is 5.0.0 then you need to ask VMware what they mean by “The chassis serial number is available for all hardware vendors.”

I actually ran into some intermittent results. I had noticed in ADDM that a few of our ESX hosts did in fact return a serial number yet others did not. Same HP hardware, same ESXi version. I posed the question to the VM engineers here and they were a little perplexed as well as the serial # was not showing up for them in their tools either.
He was not entirely sure what fixed it temporarily because he did multiple things but the serial returned in their tools and I was able to discover it with ADDM. He mentioned that he bounced the “management services” and disconnected and reconnected the host from vCenter.
One or both could have temporarily fixed our serial number retrieval issue. Hoping this might help someone else. HP hardware running VMWare ESX 4.1.0