Need to get HDD serial number from HP Proliant G8 running VMware Esxi v5.1 HP build

[gcb123]

Quite stuck on this and I am sure it really shouldn't be this difficult to be honest, I would have thought HP would have had a lot more information such as an FAQ on how to do this, but here goes:

As part of HPs recall of some SAS HDDs we are having huge problems trying to retrieve the serial numbers from an HP Proliant G8 server running VMware ESXi which has already suffered three drive failures which embarassingly we have had to replace, the server it's self is quite new and it has also affected another Proliant G8 on site but as the GUI version of the ACU was easy to get to we could spot potential failures and replace the disks but with ESXi it's a big problem, the customer cannot give us any downtime and to be honest I don't see why he should have to. Here is what I have done so far to try and retrieve these s/n's

1) Downloaded HPs Offline VMware bundle, installed the bundle and restarted the server, I have then gone into the vSphere client and yes I can see the HDDs and their status but I cannot retrieve the serial numbers. I have used SSH to go into the ESXi shell and tried to find the HPACUCLI utility but it's not there. Has anyone else had any success with this please, things are getting desperate and I cannot let constant HDD failures let us down!

Many Thanks

Gary

[Torsten.]

I'm not really sure about, but I tink you can get this from ILO-4.

[Robert_Jewell · Accepted solution]

I can confirm this!   From iLO4 you can see the attached disks and you do get info such as model and serial.

See the example below from a DL380p Gen8

Edit:  Sorry, pic isnt the best, but you should get the idea. 

-Bob

[Casper42]

There is also a CLI tool called either ACUcli or SSAcli (depends on which HP ISO you used to install) which can be used to dump all the metadata about the logical volumes and arrays and such from the CLI into a text file. Then you could dig through that and find it.

But I agree the iLO4 is by far the easiest way to get it.
The screen shot above is simply "System Information" on the left of the iLO followed by "Storage" tab up top. Then click "Expand All"