vSphere – Page 77

Extracting VID, DID & SVID from PCI devices in ESXi using vSphere API

05.18.2015 by William Lam // 3 Comments

From time to time, you may need to collect some hardware related information such as PCI devices found within your ESXi hosts. In the past, you may have gone directly to the ESXi Shell running some of the legacy esxcfg-* commands for extracting things like the PCI device's Vendor ID (VID), Device ID (DID) and Sub Vendor ID (SVID) which can be used to correlate against VMware's HCL as seen in the screenshot below.

I personally try to stay out of the ESXi Shell if I can help it and prefer to retrieve these things using an API, such as the vSphere API. Historically, I too thought the VID, DID & SVID properties were only available within the ESXi Shell, but they are actually readily available in the vSphere API. You can find all PCI devices under the hardware.pciDevice property of an ESXi host and below are the three variables that map to these properties.

Vendor ID (VID) = vendorId
Device ID (DID) = deviceId
Sub Vendor ID (SVID) = subVendorId

To quickly demonstrate how you can extract this information using the vSphere API which can be done by connecting either directly to an ESXi host or by going to vCenter Server, I have created a simple PowerCLI script called queryHostPCIInfo.ps1.

Here is an example output of running the script against my Mac Mini and we can see details such as the device name, vendor and the respective VID, DID & SVID values.

If there are other properties which you still find yourself going directly to the ESXi Shell, please leave a comment as I know the PM's are interested in these information and is working hard to ensure that all these properties are available through our vSphere API.

Quick Tip - How to change serial number for Mac OS X VM?

04.28.2015 by William Lam // 5 Comments

Last week I wrote an article on how to ensure unique serial numbers are generated when cloning Mac OS X VMs in vCloud Director and as part of that research, I also came across another neat trick that I learned from one of our Engineers, Regis Duchesne. It turns outs that in recent releases of ESXi and Fusion, you can now set a specific serial number for a Mac OS X VM for customers who may require this for testing purposes.

To set a particular serial number, you simply just need to add the following setting to your VMX file (which can also be automated when working with ESXi via the vSphere API):

serialNumber = "SERIAL-NUMBER"

Although, I was not able to find the particular release of ESXi and Fusion that introduced this capability, this trick could come in handy for those of you who have this specific requirement.

Quick Tip - Cloning Mac OS X VMs with unique serial numbers in vCloud Director

04.24.2015 by William Lam // 2 Comments

This week I learned about a really cool use case from one of our customers who is using vCloud Director to provision Mac OS X virtual machines to their end users both from a development standpoint but also for troubleshooting and demo purposes for their field and QA organizations. Instead of having to manage hardware assignment across large user base, they have built a completely self-service environment for requesting access to Mac OS X VMs, which I thought was pretty neat.

One issue that they were running into was that when they deployed a Mac OS X VM from their vCD Catalog which is a clone operation, they found that the cloned instances contained the exact same serial number as the source VM and that was giving them some problems. I had pinged a few of our engineers to see if they had any ideas and it turns out that the Mac OS X serial number is generated based off of the uuid.bios property of a VM.

Once I found this out, I knew the exact problem because this was something I had seen before when I had worked with vCD. When deploying a vApp from a Catalog in vCD, the bios.uuid property of the VMs are all kept identical and this would explain why the serial number was the same. This behavior is documented in this VMware KB 2002506 and it also includes a solution to the problem. Once the customer made the change, they were now able to deploy new Mac OS X instances with uniquely generated serial numbers. For regular vSphere or Fusion environments, when cloning a Mac OS X VM, the serial number should always be unique as this problem is only specific to vCD. I should also note that once the serial number has been generated, changing the existing bios.uuid will not force the serial number to change.