How to find esxi host install date

Last year I asked the same question on VMTN but could find a proper answer or way to find the original install date of an ESXi host until now. Earlier I was able to find the last upgrade/patching date by using the following commands but not the esxi install date,

#esxcli software vib list | grep -i base

or #esxcli software profile get

or using PowerCLI command,

Get-VMHostPatch *| Select ID, InstallDate, VMHostID

Note: Above commands can serve the purpose only if one didn’t install any patches or upgrade, otherwise you will get the last patch/upgrade installation date.

Today I came across a newly posted KB article #2144905 and here I found exactly what I was looking for so thought of making a note of it for future reference.

To determine the installation date of the ESXi host what you need to do is, first connect to the intended host over ssh using Putty and run the following command,

#echo -n "ESXi install date: " ; date -d @$(printf "%d" 0x$(esxcli system uuid get | cut -d \- -f1 ))

As you can see here we got the ESXi host installation date.

As one can’t remember this command all the time ;) so alternatively you can do this... get the system uid by using this command, esxcli system uuid get, here the first part of the system uid is the UNIX time in hexadecimal at the time the UUID was created (or esxi was installed), now convert this hexadecimal value to decimal (using any online converter) and now convert the decimal vale to a readable date format using any UNIX online timestams converter, .

That’s it... :)

VMware announced retirement plan for vSphere Client aka Desktop Client

Today VMware announced the retirement plan of vSphere Client aka Desktop Client, from the future releases of VMware vSphere there will be only HTML5 based Web client and no desktop client.

Current versions of vSphere (5.5 or 6.0) will not be affected and follow the standard support period.

For detailed information about this announcement please refer to following blog post on VMware blogs,
Goodbye vSphere Client for Windows (C#) – Hello HTML5

Currently HTML5 based Web client is available as a fling and its OVA can be downloaded from fligs by VMware Site .

Lets hope by the time of general release of vSphere HTML5 Web Client, it would be as good and snappy as vSphere desktop client.

That's it... :)

How to view more/old vCenter "Task & Events"

As most of us would be aware, by default one would see only 100 entries in vCenter Task & Events and sometimes while troubleshooting an issue that is not enough and you want to see previous/more events to find the time of issue.

There is another situation where you are looking into an issue in vCenter and the time the issue happened has just dropped off of the bottom of the Tasks or Events lists?

Well we can change the number of task & events to displayed using vSphare client, to do so,

First connect to vCenter or a host using vSphere Client => Client Settings

On this windows, Click on Lists Tab, here is the Setting we are looking at is the Page Size,

Now increase the value of Page Size from default value 100 to any value for example 1000 and you are done and can see more entries in Task & Events.

The actual Task & Event data to be displayed is depend on the vCenter Database retention policy and it is set to 180 days by default and can be chages to desiresd value in days. In case you are changing it ,then bear in mind the fact it would increase or decrease the size of vCenter database accordingly. 

To change the vCenter database retention policy, 

In vSphere client, Go to vCenter Home => Select vCenter Settings => Now click on Database retention policy

From here you can increase or decrease the same.

Related useful kb# 2110031

That’s it… J