Quick Tip - VCF 9.0 Versioning Scheme

I was answering a question the other day from a customer who had noticed the way they had fetched the version of ESXi (vmware -vl) in the ESXi Shell had been deprecated with the release of VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) 9.0, as you can see from the screenshot below.

This brought back some fond memories for me as this was a command I had used back in the original ESX Service Console as a quick way to retrieve both the version and release level for an ESX(i) host.

While the vmware utility can still be used with VCF 9.0, the replacement command-line argument for -vl is -r for release and here is an example of what that output would look like:

With VCF 9.0, VMware has introduced a new versioning model for its unified software releases. As a result, various means including utilities and APIs for fetching the software version has been updated to reflect the new versioning scheme.

The next obvious question you might ask, what is the new versioning scheme?

Starting with the release of VCF 9.0, the release structure is now in the format of X.Y.Z.A where:

• X = Major Release
• Y = Minor Release
• Z = Maintenance Release
• A = Express & Hot Patches
  • A is further broken down into EEHH
  • EE are the Express Patch digits (starts at 01)
  • HH are for Hot Patch digits (starts at 01)

For the VCF 9.0 release, the version is 9.0.0.0 or more accurately 9.0.0.0000 (with the expanded EEHH).

Lets take another example, since a new express patch (9.0.0.0100) was just recently released for VCF 9.0, we can see that EE has incremented from 00 to 01 as the first express patch and since we do not have any hot patches, HH is still at 00.

You will also find the new versioning when using the vSphere API as an example.

When connecting to vCenter Server using PowerCLI and retrieving the about information by running the following:

$global:DefaultVIServer.ExtensionData.Content.About

We can see new versioning reflected the apiVersion property.

Similarly, when connecting to an ESXi host (directly or indirectly using vCenter Server), we can see the same information but ESXi also includes a PatchLevel property, which was introduced back in vSphere 7.0 Update 2 where you can retrieve the EEHH value.

In my setup, I have patched my ESXi host from 9.0.0.0000 to latest patch 9.0.0.0100 and hence the Patchlevel shows 0100.

Hopefully this was helpful in understanding the new VCF 9.0 versioning structure.

One last thing to be aware of is the new support model and release cadence that has also been introduced with VCF 9, definitely some good news and worth read if you have not already seen it!