I figured I would follow up with a little more detail of how I got this working with pywbem:
1. install python and pywbem on a scripting host.
2. Create a workflow or action that uses the ssh plugin.
3. Create a script similar to this on your scripting host:
import pywbem,sys
# Make connection
esxHost = sys.argv[1]
username = sys.argv[2]
pwd = sys.argv[3]
conn = pywbem.WBEMConnection('https://' + esxHost, # url (username, pwd), # credentials
default_namespace = 'root/cimv2')
# Get all CIM_System instances
names = conn.EnumerateInstanceNames('CIM_System')
# Call GetInstance on returned instances
for n in names:
chassis = conn.GetInstance(n)
keystoprint = ['Tag', 'SerialNumber', 'OtherIdentifyingInfo']
for key, value in chassis.items():
if key in keystoprint:
print '%s = %s' % (key, value)
4. This will actaully only return values for 'OtherIdentifyingInfo' I was using the same script to test against other instance types and spit out any values for Tag and Serial Number as well. I found with some of our older blade systems that the tagging was not consistent. It seems like in newer systems there are always Tags 23 and 23.1 (Host and Chassis) . VMware will display both of these if they are found but in some of the older HP blades there was only tags for the chassis and not the Host. In OtherIdentyingInfo is where they would put the hosts serial which is what we needed. This value seems consistent for the newer blades as well so that is the field we are extracting. Hope this ends up helping some folk in the future.
