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.