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fawadsiddiq
Contributor
Contributor

Extract ESXi host information from vm guest server

Hi All,

I have an issue with one of the vm's in our environment, what i would like to do is, extract esxi host information (hostname or IP) from a guest virtual machine running server 2008, could anyone help me with this ?

I know most will say it cant be done, others will ask why as it will expose a security flaw etc...Below i will try to explain to the best of my knowledge why i want to do this.

One/more of our system admins are a bit lazy unfortunately and have been cloning servers without running sysprep after the cloning process, as a result I have ended up with what looks like a vm powered off in the vmware console, however i am able to ping the machine, since its running in a terminal services environment, i can RDP to it and see that users are connected to the vm. Theres only 1 vm that shares the same IP and hostname.

Troubleshooting so far

- Search for hostname and IP address through the vSphere client

- Run a script that queries DNS names and IP addresses of all vm guests and displays its output

- Checked and matched up the MAC address of the NIC adaptor's

- Ran a couple of tools that also query vm hostnames and IP's to see if the output was the same as the script that was run.

Unfortunately the MAC address for the NIC is the same as the powered off VM, and the DNS queries etc all point to a powered off VM.

So i was wondering if i could get the esx hostname that the vm resides on from the guest, to carry out the next phase of my troubleshooting

Thanks in adavnce for your time

Fawad

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3 Replies
JCMorrissey
Expert
Expert

Hi Fawad,

Just checking if you reviewed

Finding the ESX/ESXi host on which a virtual machine is running (2004187) | VMware KB

Please consider marking as "helpful", if you find this post useful. Thanks!... http://johncmorrissey.wordpress.com/
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VMARA
Enthusiast
Enthusiast

Please review the given KB article and there is a Blogpost from William Lam, try that as well

How to extract host information from within a VM? | virtuallyGhetto

please share your outputs

Aruna Lakmal Virtualization Professional | vExpert and a Blogger
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RGWiggles
Contributor
Contributor

Given my extensive research and attempts to set guest info from within VMWare ESXi SSH, I've come to the conclusion that this is not possible.

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