ESXi Commands Part-2: Finding Hardware information using esxcli

In this series we will see on how you can easily get information using commands in ESXi. This is the second part where we will see some of the basic commands on how you can find the physical server hardware information using the esxcli. esxcli is the command line interface framework in vmware vsphere which provides modular architecture for the components “Namespace” running in VMkernel. esxcli is powerful command line interface which provides very helpful information. you don’t need to install any other software to run esxcli. esxcli can be directly run into the ESXi using Putty. Information you will find that can be very useful in the time of troubleshooting the physical hardware issues.

In this post we will see on by using esxcli how we can get our server’s hardware information. Below is the list of servers hardware information you can get by using the esxcli.

• cpu : It will help you to find the CPU information of the physical server.
• ipmi : It will help you to find the IPMI information.
• smartcard : It will help you to find the Smartcard information such as tokens.
• bootdevice : It will help you to find the bootdevice information such as boot device sequence or order.
• clock : It will help you to get the current hardware clock time or you can also set the hardware clock time.
• memory : It will help you to get the server’s memory information such as Physical memory, Reliable memory & NUMA Node Count.
• pci : It will help you to get the information about all the pci devices available on the physical hardware.
• platform : It will help you to get the information about the platform running on the physical hardware such as Product Name, Vendor Name, Serial Number , UUID.
• trustedboot : It will help you to get the information about status of trusted boot such as TPM & DRTM status.

There is an syntax of running the each command using the esxcli. In this post we will see on how we can use the command “esxcli hardware” to get the above information from our esxi server.

Syntax of the command is as follows:

esxcli hardware {cmd} {cmd options}

esxcli hardware is the command which you can run directly into ESXi without any option. But to get into deeper you will have to use the Namespaces with the command.
Where first {cmd} will be the any of the namespace available above & after you can use the available namespaces or available commands w.r.t get the information.

We will see one by one each Namespaces:

cpu Namespace:

Command : 
esxcli hardware cpu

Here you can use 2 Namespace & 1 command.
cpuid  :  It will show the information from the CPUID instruction on each CPU.
global  :  It will help you to get information & configuration global to all CPUs.

list: It will help you to list the available CPU with their information. You can see in the screenshot above.

ipmi Namespace:

Command : 
esxcli hardware ipmi

Here you can use 3 Namespaces to get the information about IPMI.
fru : It will show the information from IPMI Field Replaceable Unit Inventory (FRU).
sdr : It will show the information from IPMI Sensor Data Repository (SDR).
sel : It will show the information from IPMI System Event Log (SEL).

smartcard Namespace :

Command : 
esxcli hardware smartcard

Here you can use 4 Namespaces to get the information about smartcards.
certificate : It will show the information about token certificates (i.e smart card).
info            : It will show the information about smart card subsystem.
slot            : It will show the information about smart card readers (Slots).
token        : It will show the information about available security tokens (i.e smart cards).

bootdevice Namespace:

Command : 
esxcli hardware bootdevice

Here you have 1 command to get the information about bootdevices.
list : It will list the boot device order (If available.)

clock Namespace :

Command : 
esxcli hardware clock

Here you have 2 command for clock. Namespace.
get : It will show the current hardware clock time as shown above in the image.
set : It will help you to set the hardware clock time.

memory Namespace :

Command : 
esxcli hardware memory

Here you have 1 command to get information about memory.
get : It will help you to get the memory information such as Available Physical Memory, Reliable memory & NUMA Node Count.

pci Namespace :

Command : 
esxcli hardware pci

Here you have 1 command to get information about pci.
list : It will help you to get all the pci device information.

platform Namespace :

Command : 
esxcli hardware platform

Here you have 1 command to get information about physical server platform.
get : It will display the information about the physical server platform such as UUID, Product Name, Vendor, Serial Number & IPMI status.

trustedboot Namespace :

Command : 
esxcli hardware trustedboot

Here you have 1 command to get information about trusted boot of server.
get : It will provide the information about trusted boot TPM & DRTM status.

You can also try this options to get the details & information about the server’s in your environment.

Checkout our Posts on ESXi Command Line Series:-

ESXi Commands Part-1 : Basic commands.

ESXi Commands Part-3 : Managing ESXi using esxcli commands

ESXi Commands Part-4 : Managing ESXi Networking using esxcli commands

ESXi Commands Part-5 : Finding VM information using esxcli

ESXi Commands Part-6 : Managing Storage using esxcli

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