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You are here: Home / VCSA / Quick Tip - How to quickly find the release & build number on VCSA

Quick Tip - How to quickly find the release & build number on VCSA

02.05.2014 by William Lam // 4 Comments

I have been spending quite a bit of time in the lab lately (researching, prototyping, breaking things, etc.) and one of the challenges I have is figuring out which environment I am actually logged into. I literally have a dozen VCSA (vCenter Server Appliances) deployed for various testing and I always forget the build and release the system I am currently logged into. A quick way to get this information on your VCSA is to run the following command:

vpxd -v

Note: There is also vpxd.exe for vCenter Server running on Windows which you can also use.

I also noticed in the VCSA 5.1 it used to provide the vCenter Server build and release number when SSH into the host but it looks like this has now changed with the VCSA 5.5 release. I suspect this might be related to some of the security hardening that has been done by VMware on our appliances (which is great) and I assume there maybe an issue by providing the build and version info as part of the SSH banner.

If you wish to re-enable this feature, you can just edit the /etc/ssh/sshd_config and specify the banner to point to /etc/ssh/banner which will includes both the release and build information. In any case, if you are in a pinch and need to quickly figure out the version, you can use the command above.

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Categories // VCSA, vSphere Tags // build number, release number, ssh banner, vcenter server appliance, vcsa, vcva, vpxd

Comments

  1. VirtualJMills says

    03/07/2014 at 2:37 am

    Bill-

    There are a few additional versions you might want to know about for VCSA:

    /opt/vmware/bin/vamicli version --studio
    The build of VMware Studio used to construct the VCSA

    /opt/vmware/bin/vamicli version --appliance
    The version of VCSA as reported in various parts of the VAMI UI (https://....:5480/)

    /usr/bin/vmware-toolbox-cmd -v
    VMware Tools version

    -that JMills 🙂

    Reply
  2. George N. says

    02/23/2017 at 8:08 am

    excellent.. thanks!

    Reply
  3. Jobi says

    02/24/2017 at 2:30 am

    Is there a way to find appliance (6.0)installation date?

    Reply
  4. Sam Woz says

    10/06/2017 at 12:02 pm

    Thanks man!

    Reply

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Author

William Lam is a Senior Staff Solution Architect working in the VMware Cloud team within the Cloud Infrastructure Business Group (CIBG) at VMware. He focuses on Cloud Native technologies, Automation, Integration and Operation for the VMware Cloud based Software Defined Datacenters (SDDC)

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