Connect to an ESXi host or vCenter and enter the username and password for the administrative account:. In this case, you should run two commands. Here is a command to get a list of all VMs on a host or cluster and show IP addresses where it is possible:.
Change [0] to [1] if you want to display the second IP address. You can delete these characters from the command to see the difference in the displayed results. In my example, I connect to the ESXi host mentioned in the previous example:. MAC addresses are not assigned randomly. The first half of a MAC address is usually associated with the appropriate hardware or software manufacturer. What if you wanted to to associate a specific piece of information from ESX i and be able to access that piece of information from the guestOS?
You can do so with the vmtoolsd VMware Tools Daemon utility. This utility has an option called --cmd that allows you to run various commands including one that allows you to extract guest information using the "info-get" parameter. This guestinfo can be set using two methods:. Option 1 is pretty straight forward, you can add a custom attribute that has the following format:.
You can use the vSphere Client to add this custom attribute while the virtual machine is powered off or you can manually edit the. One the VM is powered on, you can extract this piece of information, here is an example:.
Option 2 is actually pretty interesting as the configuration of the custom guestinfo variable is not permanently stored. What I mean by this is the configuration is only persisted while the VM is running. This is interesting because if you have runtime information that potentially could change, this allows you to dynamically present this information to the guestOS. One use case could be set for management VMs such vCenter running in a VM and you wanted to know at any given time which ESX i host is currently managing it.
This can be trivial with vCenter access, but what if the service is offline but the virtual machine is still running? Using the classic ESX Service Console command vmware-cmd you can loop through all powered on VMs and set some custom variables for example the current hostname of the ESX host managing the VM and version it is currently on.
Note: Notice, you do not need to append the keyword guestinfo , you just need to specify the variable name. Once you are in the guestOS, to access the custom variable, you will need to specify the full name which should be "guestinfo. As you can see this can be tedious to set for each and every VM, so let's automate this using a script that will go through all powered on VMs and set two custom variables called " hypervisor.
You will want to save this script to your ESX host and make sure the script has executable permissions for it to execute. You will also create a cronjob based on how often you want the script to run and this needs to be configured for every ESX host that you would like to take part in this update. As I mentioned earlier, option 2 does not persist these custom variables with respect to the VM's configuration file.
The variable configuration only takes affect when the VM is powered on and once it is powered off, the information is discarded. Here is an example of this script:.
The format is slightly different than that of the classic ESX's vmware-cmd. Here is an example of this:. Notice, the variable name must include "guestinfo. If you wanted to persist these configurations, you will need to adjust your provision workflow to append the variables into the VM's.
I was wondering how the customization process by quickprep or sysprep is working, does it use this method to pass the settings into the VM?
My linux guests do not seem to have either vmware-toolbox-cmd or vmtoolsd. I have the following rpm installed rpm -qa grep VMware :. You're probably running the older version of tools, try type "vmware" and then hit "tab" button, you should see it auto-complete and there should be a utility with "toolbox" in the name, I forget off hand what it's called.
However I have vmware-cmd on my linux guest after installing VMware Tools, so is there a way to use it from the guest so that the guest actually gets the host to add his name or any other unique info? Can you please suggest a way out to identify this through my application's C Code. Hi, i need to do the opposite - to extract information about all guests from the host OS.
Learn More ». JJoyner This person is a verified professional. Verify your account to enable IT peers to see that you are a professional. A few questions: 1 What OS is the virtual machine?
If you can help me by narrowing down those parameters, I'll try to find out what I can. Thai Pepper. Purduepete Jul 30, at UTC. In the registry there's a key called "HostName"; that should tell you what the host name is. Niall Jul 30, at UTC. I may be willing to accept bribes for Best Answer! Pure Capsaicin. Important question Scott Alan Miller wrote: Important question I need the physical location so I can remote in, know it for future reference and so I can reboot it to resolve an issue.
Annoyingly Remote connection to the VM still obviously allow a reboot from there. Apologies for sounding so dim on this one. Virtualisation isn't my strong suit. Niall wrote: I need the physical location so I can remote in, know it for future reference and so I can reboot it to resolve an issue. Virtualisation isn't my strong suit I'm confused. How does knowing the physical location allow you to remote in? The ability to remote in is one of the reasons that physical location should not matter to you.
Rebooting should not require knowledge of physical location. Knowing physical location, in theory, should not be something you ever need operationally. If you feel that you do, something is probably wrong. In some cases you would need to know it for DR planning purposes but only to understand how the system could potentially fail. Scott Alan Miller wrote: I'm confused. Now he didn't need to know the VM Host either to reboot, but that is a teaching point.
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