I have a VMware infrastructure with some ESXi 4.1 hosts and a vCenter Server 5.0 installed. I need to extend our hardware inventory with the following info:
- how many memory slots are available in each ESXi host
- how many and what type (DDR2/DDR3, size, MHz) of memory modules are installed in the slots
To collect this info I have to use PowerCLI and if needed, I can use ESXCli from within it. However I do not have ssh access to the ESXi hosts, so running native ESXi commands is not a possibility.
Is there a way to query the memory information from PowerCLI?
(As a bonus it would be lovely to query if the RAID controllers in the ESXi hosts have a BBWC module installed...)
So these are HP ProLiant servers. You have a variety of methods to gain the inventory information you're looking for... Of the available choices, querying the VMware host via PowerCLI is about the last option I'd use...
hponcfg
(ILO) orhpasmcli
(management agents) orhpacucli
(RAID) utilities.dmidecode
(on older hosts).smbiosDump
oresxcfg-info
, scripted or manually.I'll add that if you're not using the HP build of ESXi or don't have the HP .VIB bundles installed, you won't get full visibility into the storage system features.
Also see:
How to find out more hardware details using only ESXi4.1 and (possibly) shell
and
Options for managing Smart Array P400 on an ESXi 5 host
With the smbiosDump command it is possible to know how many RAM expansion slots and which are connected in each one.
Example:
To know the number of slots:
It shows us the total RAM installed for 12 slots:
Here more detail of how it works: https://www.sysadmit.com/2018/05/vmware-esxi-ver-modulos-de-ram.html