When visiting a client site and looking at their ESX/ESXi servers for the first time, one of the first things I look for is the ESX version they are running.  Although the minor releases of ESX are differentiated by their U1,U2,U3, etc titles it is not always apparent what build is running by a quick glance at the VMware Infrastructure Client (VIC) interface.

Below is a table that lists some common ESX and ESXi build numbers for reference. *Note: If anyone has extra build details that could be added to this table please let me know as this is by no means an exhaustive list.

The following are different methods (via the GUI and CLI) of determining the build of an ESX server.

VMware Infrastructure Client:

From the VIC there are a few ways of finding the ESX build number.

The first is by clicking on the ESX server in the VIC and selecting the ‘Summary’ tab.  The ESX version and build can be seen along the top of the row of tabs (see below).  In the example below the build number is 123629 (ESXi, 3.5.0).

The second way is also very straight forward.  From the dropdown menu of the VIC select ‘Help’ –> ‘About VMware Infrastructure’.  An ‘about’ box will then be presented (see below) which gives both the VICs version and build numbers along with that for the ESX server itself.

A third way is by generating an HTML based ‘summary’ report on  the ESX server.  To generate such a report right mouse click on the ESX server you want to run the report against and select ‘Report Summary’ (see below).

Choose the location to save the summary report and press ‘Save’.  Once the report has been run and saved then open it (depending on your file extension association it will likely open in your web browser).

You will then see a report similar to the one below.  As you can see, the top row gives the build and version number of the ESX server.

Service Console:

To find out the version and base build number via the Service Console (ESX 3.x) follow either:

1. Type ‘vmware –v’ at the prompt

or to see which patches have been applied

2. Follow these two basic steps.

1. Log in to the ESX Server Service Console.

2. At the command prompt issue the following command:

   #esxupdate query

This will then generate a list containing the version and build along with all subsequent updates that have been applied.

In the example below you can see that the full ESX 3.5.0-64607 ‘bundle’ was installed and then a long list of patches and updates applied.

At the very bottom of this updates list you can see that ‘ESX Server 3.5.0 Update 3’ has been applied. So this server is running ESX 3.5.0 Update 3.

For more information on determining ESX detailed build number details via the service console check out this VMware KB article.

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