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2 Ways to Get Dell Service Tag on VMWare ESXi Server Virtual Machine

Question: How do I find out the DELL service tag and express code of a PowerEdge server that is running VMWare ESXi (or VMWare Server)?

Answer: Depending on what you are running (i.e VMWare ESXi or VMWare Server), use one of the methods shown below to identify the DELL service tag.

Method 1: Identify DELL Service TAG on VMWare Server

If you’ve installed VMWare server on a base OS, you can login to the base OS, and use dmidecode to get the service tag as shown below. This is just like how you identify service tag for DELL poweredge servers on a normal non-virtual server that is running a Linux OS.

# dmidecode | more
Handle 0x0100, DMI type 1, 25 bytes.
System Information
        Manufacturer: Dell Computer Corporation
        Product Name: PowerEdge 2850
        Serial Number: H234567

Refer to View DELL Service Tag and Express Service Code From Linux and Windows for more details.

Method 2: Identify DELL Service TAG on VMWare ESXi

If you’ve installed VMWare ESXi, there is no Base OS. If you do dmidecode on one of the virtual machine running on that ESXi, you’ll not get the DELL Service TAG. Instead, you’ll get information about the VMware as shown below.

# dmidecode | more
Handle 0x0001, DMI type 1, 27 bytes
System Information
        Manufacturer: VMware, Inc.
        Product Name: VMware Virtual Platform
        Serial Number: VMware-11 aa bb cc dd ee ff gg-hh ii jj

To identify DELL service tag on this server, you should login to vSphere client -> click on the top level node in the left-hand tree structure (this is the vmware node) -> click on the “Configuration” tab -> On the left side, it will display “Hardware” and “Software” sections -> click on “Processors” link in the “Hardware” section -> under the “System”, you’ll see the DELL service tag as shown in the picture below.

Fig: DELL Service Tag displayed from vSphere Client

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Comments on this entry are closed.

  • Rich November 30, 2010, 8:01 am

    You can also access the ESXi host’s serial number from the command line, if you have the maintenance console enabled. The command

    esxcfg-info -w

    will give you hardware information for the server, including the Dell service tag (listed as “Serial Number”.

  • Ulrich Hiller November 30, 2010, 9:54 am

    Another way to find out the Service Tag is looking into the RAM using the strings command, e.g.:
    ~> strings /dev/mem | head -10000 > /tmp/file.temp
    Somewhere in the file.temp you see something like this:
    _UUID_
    DELLK
    OZ1X
    _SM_
    _DMI_g
    Dell Inc.
    11/05/2007
    DELLK
    OZ1X
    Dell Inc.
    OptiPlex 755
    AB77J56
    Dell Inc.
    0GM819
    ..CN35K5BTPQJ3B6.
    Dell Inc.
    AB77J56
    Intel
    PARALLEL
    SERIAL1
    SERIAL2
    KYBD
    MOUSE
    USB1
    USB2
    USB3

    I admit, this is a very awful method to look for the service tag, but nethertheless looking into the RAM is sometimes interesting and may give some hints for debugging problems.

  • Anonymous January 28, 2011, 11:48 am

    ace, this is exactly what i was looking for

  • John June 26, 2012, 9:31 am

    Thank you very much for this info!

  • helper July 18, 2012, 7:52 am

    For VMWare 5, to get the equivalent info run the
    /sbin/esxcli hardware platform get

  • liam November 8, 2012, 3:34 am

    FWIW, in the esxi log files it’s also in:
    /commands/smbiosDump.txt
    just grep “Serial”

    hth

  • DC01 August 21, 2013, 8:05 am

    To Helper
    Thank you very much for this command as it is helping me a lot.

    Thanks

  • Kathy February 26, 2015, 10:00 am

    Thank you. So nice to quickly find the right answer.

  • Mike April 3, 2015, 1:12 pm

    Out of 8 identical Dell VMware hosts, only ONE pulls the service code under Configuration/Processors!