[facter] ESX/vSphere version detection without vmware tools

[Keiran Sweet]

Hi Everyone,

I'm looking for a way to identify (if possible) the ESX/vSphere version that a particular VMWare guest server is running on without the use of vmware tools related commands, such as vmware-checkvm, which does seem to do the trick from what I can gather.

[root@server ~]# vmware-checkvm -h

VM's hw version is 4

VMware software version 6 (good)

[root@server ~]#

The reason behind this is that we have brought online a new site that uses ESX5, and I'd like new VM's to be able to self classify what ESX specific packages and services to install and manage without any admin intervention, ie, Do I install the ESX4 tools, or the ESX5 ones.

I have had a bit of a poke around to see if this is possible, but have so far come up empty handed, and feel it may not be possible in a way that I can roll it into a custom fact, so i may have to go down the route of pushing some new values into our ENC that define the version of ESX in use at each particular site, which isnt perfect, but will also do the job.

Has anyone ever had to deal with this chicken/egg situation ?

And if so, did you find a solution ?

Thanks in advance,

K

[Wolf Noble]

Hi Keiran,

I wrote this and posted it to the list awhile ago:

https://github.com/wolfspyre/vmware_puppetfact

there's been some suggestion that the source I used as a basis for this fact is slightly inaccurate, however I don't have a suite of esx servers to test on.. (it's on my list)

feel free to inform me of changes that are required, and I'll happily make them.


W

On Oct 31, 2012, at 1:26 PM, Keiran Sweet <kei...@gmail.com>
wrote:

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[Keiran Sweet]

Cheers for this, it's given me some food for thought.

Given the backwards/forwards compatibility of some versions of VMWare Tools, my issue isn't as serious as I initially thought, however I would like to go down this path long term so that our VM's perform optimally.

My only concern with using the BIOS strings is that an unexpected update to the ESX nodes (it is managed by a different team) may cause some of my puppet code/infrastructure to experience unexpected results without fail safe type logic, which may not be pretty.

Thanks again,

K

ps, If anyone at EMC/VMWare is listening, a sneaky string with the version number in the BIOS or other accessible firmware would be amazing :)