Determining the name of the VMware host of a VM guest - from the guest

vmware-esx vmware-esxi hostname guest vmware-tools

40,812

You can't do it without first editing the VMX file.

Here is the stackoverflow answer to the same question

40,812

warren

I'm a hobbyist programmer, part-time sysadmin, and full-time analytics, big data, data center management, automation, and cloud computing architect and delivery engineer.

Updated on September 17, 2022

Comments

warren almost 2 years

Is it possible to determine the name of the VMware host (ESX or ESXi) that my guest resides in, from within the guest itself?

I would expect this to be possible via VMware Tools, but am not sure where to look.
- Admin almost 14 years
  
  Is there a reason you wouldn't just take a look in vCenter? If you click on the server, the host is listed in the Status tab...
- Admin almost 14 years
  
  @Jes - I'm looking to do this from a script
- Admin almost 14 years
  
  Why would you want to do that? Just curious.
- Admin almost 14 years
  
  in the context of a large, managed environment, it would be nice to be able to run a script on some schedule that would report to syslog or similar the host that it is resident upon
- Admin over 13 years
  
  @Graeme Donaldson - to expand on my previous comment, when VMs move between hosts due to vMotion or because migration/upgrading of the underlying hardware of hypervisor is coming along, knowing where a given VM is currently running would be nice... but it appears this is [sadly] non-trivial (at least for now)
warren almost 14 years

that's for Workstation, and I'm looking at this form an ESX/ESXi perspective (clarifying my question)
Helvick almost 14 years

The same limitation applies - getting information about the Hypervisor from within a guest is generally not easy, unless you already know the identity of the Hypervisor and can talk to it over the network.
JakeRobinson almost 14 years

It doesn't matter if its workstation, ESX, or any other VMware product. It's a security setting that has to be disabled.
Admin over 13 years

These are pretty kludgey solutions and the later assumes you know who the host is, which is exactly what is being looked for. If you'd looked at previous answers you'd see that the ESX host provides an API that you can connect to that introduces itself. It's always best to use provided features before hacking your own!
Admin about 10 years

Which powershell scripts in particular? As it stands this answer is pretty poor