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 5.1
VMware vSphere ESXi 6.5
VMware vSphere ESXi 6.7
VMware vSphere ESXi 5.0
VMware vSphere ESXi 5.5
VMware vSphere ESXi 6.0
VMware vSphere ESXi 7.0.0

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:
   
   echo -n "ESXi install date: " ; date -d @$(printf "%d" 0x$(esxcli system uuid get | cut -d \- -f1 ))
   ESXi install date: Mon Mar 9 17:08:08 UTC 2015

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:

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

Name Version Vendor Acceptance Level Install Date

esx-base 6.0.0-0.0.2494585 VMware VMwareCertified 2015-03-09

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.

ESXi ホストをインストールした日付の特定
确定 ESXi 主机的安装日期