ESXi Host Serial Number with PowerCLI (v5.0 or later)

I was recently asked to pull serial numbers for each of the ESXi hosts in my environment. I initially assumed that this would be a property in the VMHost object in PowerCLI, and would thus be a trivial task.

Guess what? It isn’t.

PowerCLI> Get-VMHost | Get-Member -MemberType Property | select Name

 Name
 ----
 Parent
 NumCpu
 PowerState
 ParentId
 Model
 MemoryUsageMB
 NetworkInfo
 Name
 ProcessorType
 VMSwapfileDatastore
 Version
 VMSwapfilePolicy
 VMSwapfileDatastoreId
 StorageInfo
 State
 Uid
 TimeZone
 MemoryUsageGB
 CustomFields
 CpuUsageMhz
 ExtensionData
 DiagnosticPartition
 Build
 ApiVersion
 CpuTotalMhz
 ConnectionState
 FirewallDefaultPolicy
 MaxEVCMode
 Manufacturer
 MemoryTotalMB
 MemoryTotalGB
 Id
 HyperthreadingActive
 LicenseKey
 IsStandalone

Hardware serial number is one of those “I could have sworn I saw it here once” properties that isn’t actually available.

Some Google searching yielded a few different approaches to solve for this question. From what I found, they seem to either pull the serial number from a vSphere View of each host, or from some out-of-band management system (such as HP iLO). Unfortunately, for reasons that are not important, neither of these methods worked for me.

It turns out, though, that there is a way to get the serial number using esxcli:

esxcli hardware platform

Since PowerCLI 5.0, you can make calls to esxcli using the Get-EsxCli cmdlet. If you combine this with the very powerful New-VIProperty cmdlet, you can actually add the serial number to the VMHost object, and thus to the output of Get-VMHost.

New-VIProperty -ObjectType VMHost -Name SerialNumber -Value `
{ (Get-EsxCli -VMHost $Args[0]).hardware.platform.get().SerialNumber }
Get-VMHost | Select Name,SerialNumber

Not exactly a high-performance solution, but as long as your hosts are all at ESXi 5.0 or later, it works!

Special thanks to Luc Dekens for his valuable New-VIProperty insights.