Determining the installation date of an ESXi host

Products

• VMware vSphere ESXi

Issue/Introduction

The purpose of this article is to determine the installation date of an ESXi host.

Environment

VMware vSphere ESXi 5.x

VMware vSphere ESXi 6.x

VMware vSphere ESXi 7.x

VMware vSphere ESXi 8.x

Resolution

Note: The first part of the system UUID is the Unix time (aka Epoch time) in hexadecimal at the time the UUID was created. This can be converted to decimal, and the date command can then be used to convert the Unix time to a human readable value.

1. Log in to ESXi server through SSH.
2. Run this command to determine the installation date of the ESXi host:
   
   echo -n "ESXi install date: " ; date -d @$(printf "%d" 0x$(esxcli system uuid get | cut -d \- -f1 ))
   
   For example:
   
   [root@esxi1:~] echo -n "ESXi install date: " ; date -d @$(printf "%d" 0x$(esxcli system uuid get | cut -d \- -f1 ))
ESXi install date: Wed Jun 19 14:05:36 UTC 2024

Alternatively, if you are running ESXi 6.5 or high you can also run the following command to fine the ESXi install date.

esxcli system stats installtime get

Additional Information

The following command displays the installation date of the ESXi server as long as there have been no subsequent patches or updates:

esxcli software vib list | grep 'Install\|esx-base'

For example:

[root@esxi1:~] esxcli software vib list | grep 'Install\|esx-base'
Name                           Version                               Vendor  Acceptance Level  Install Date  Platforms
esx-base                       8.0.3-0.0.24022510                    VMware  VMwareCertified   2024-06-19    host

If there have been additional patches or updates since ESXi was installed, the result from the above command will show the date of the latest patch/update only, and not the ESXi installation date.