How to know what ESX version is running on your VM

This article describes how to discover the ESX version when we have only access to the VM guest.

When troubleshooting issues, I sometimes need to know the ESX version when my VM’s are running, but in the classic scenario where we don’t have any type of privileges, it is pretty hard to get that information.

So at this point you can go ask the VMware admin, or you can be creative… and we would not be a good troubleshooters if we are not creative!

Basically, we will match the vmwaretools version with the VMware version-mapping file.

1) If we have a VM then we should have VMware tools installed:

# vmware-toolbox-cmd -v

The first 3 chars give us the version crude, in this case I see is: 9.0.5

# vmware-toolbox-cmd -v | cut -d. -f1-3

2) This version is that we need match on VMware version-mapping:
http://packages.vmware.com/tools/versions

Or from command line:

$ wget -q http://packages.vmware.com/tools/versions -0 vmware-esxi.txt
$ grep 9.0.5 vmware-esxi.txt

And there is!

Maybe is not exactly version but 2 steps back we don’t have any idea to the version.

Happy troubleshooting!