Knowing your ESXi Build Number can be very useful. It’s really easy to do with vCenter. Without vCenter it’s not as straight forward. Here are a few ways to get your build number when you don’t have vCenter.
Console
If you have access to the console of the ESXi host via IPMI or iLO or iDRAC or physical access, you can get your ESXi build number right from there, you don’t even need to login.
You can also get your ESXi build number right from the Help menu in the Web UI.
- Login to the Web UI of your ESXi host
- Click on Help > About
You will now get a screen that show you your ESXi build number.
It should look something like this
In this example we know that my ESXi build number is 19482537.
SSH
- Enable SSH on your ESXi Host by right clicking on the host and selecting Services > Enable Secure Shell
- Login to your ESXi host with SSH
- Enter the following command
vmware -v
You will get an output that looks something like this
VMware ESXi 7.0.3 build-19482537
In this example we know that my ESXi build number is 19482537.
ESXi Config Backup File
You can also get your ESXi build number from an ESXi config backup file, which can be helpful if you want to know which ESXi build number was installed when a backup was taken.
To do this we will need something that can open a tgz archive. I like to use 7-Zip.
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