Ever wonder how VI Client got its system summary data?

That’s easy – it hooks into the DMI/SMBIOS subsystem. This information typically includes system manufacturer, model name, serial number, BIOS version, asset tag as well as a lot of other details of varying level of interest and reliability depending on the manufacturer. This will often include usage status for the CPU sockets, expansion slots (e.g. AGP, PCI, ISA) and memory module slots, and the list of I/O ports (e.g. serial, parallel, USB)

Now if you do a cat /proc/cpuinfo on the Service Console, you’ll see all the relevant details for only 1 of your CPUs. How many are there in your server though?

For that, we use dmidecode. Run it in your service console like this: dmidecode | more and you will see relevant data about your platform (model and number, ownership information, number of processors and even your platform’s Serial Number/Service Tag).

Check it out:

[root@esx01 root]# dmidecode | more
# dmidecode 2.2
SMBIOS 2.3 present.
...
BIOS Information
Vendor: HP
Version: P51
Release Date: 07/19/2007
...
System Information
Manufacturer: HP
Product Name: ProLiant DL380 G4
Version: Not Specified
Serial Number: AUB44902R6

All done, and the best bit is you can use it via ks.cfg kickstart scripts to modify your servers based on hardware IDs – watch for my 17-page kickstart to demonstrate this soon.