How to determine the VMWare ESX Version from commandline Linux.

Simple!

1. Ensure you have dmidecode installed. if not install it, for CentOS (yum install dmidecode).
2. Type in commandline dmidecode and it will throw a list information about your hardware recorded in the BIOS for you. Since you want only the ESX Version, you can filter info by issuing “dmidecode -t bios” (without the quote)
bios
3. just look at “Address”
address
4. You can see from the pic above, I have Address: 0xEA050, compare it on the version mapping below

“0xE8480” = “ESX 2.5”
“0xE7C70” = “ESX 3.0”
“0xE7910” = “ESX 3.5”
“0xE7910” = “ESX 4”
“0xEA550” = “ESX 4U1”
“0xEA2E0” = “ESX 4.1”
“0xE72C0” = “ESXi 5”
“0xEA0C0” = “ESXi 5.1”
“0xEA050” = “ESXi 5.5”

5. so in my case I’m using ESXi 5.5!

That’s it!