Installation guide

www.vmware.com

VMware ESX Server Administration Guide

Enabling the Physical Hardware’s OEM ID to Be Seen by the

Virtual Machine

Each virtual machine is automatically assigned an Original Equipment Manufacturer

ID (OEMID), comprising the Manufacturer and Product Name, which is stored in the

SMBIOS system information descriptor. It can be accessed by standard SMBIOS

scanning software — for example SiSoftware Sandra or the IBM utility smbios2 —

and used for systems management in the same way you use the OEMID of a physical

computer.

By default, the Manufacturer string is “VMware, Inc.” and the Product Name string is

“VMware Virtual Platform”.

If the virtual machine’s configuration file has the option

SMBIOS.reflectHost = TRUE

then the Manufacturer and Product Name strings in the virtual machine are the same

as the Manufacturer and Product Name of the host system.

These strings are updated (copied from the host BIOS to the virtual machine BIOS) on

every virtual machine BIOS POST (Power On Self Test).