Find the IP address of a VMware ESXi host

If you really only have the guest’s IP address, you generally cannot obtain the host’s IP address. There may be some configurations where it could work, though.

From your (PC’s) perspective, the virtual machine is just another network-accessible computer. Even in the guest’s local network (broadcast domain), a VM cannot be distinguished from a real PC physically connected to a switch just by looking at its IP address and the way traffic takes to get there.

If you have the vsphere client, you can open the console of a guest machine and the title bar will show you which host you are connected to:

You can see in the example above that the XA_StreamDev is on a host (with its name faded out). If you ping that host name, you will be able to get its ip address.

To open the full console, right click your VM and select "Open Console".

Also, if you go to VCenter > Hosts & Clusters > you will be able to see a list of hosts - which again, you should be able to ping.

Theoretically, you may find that ESXi host can't be accessed because its IP address is beyond your scope.

But if you know its IP address range which you can access, the following tools ("ESXi host finder") can help you to find which one is the possible ESXi host:

https://yinqingwang.wordpress.com/2016/01/18/esxi-host-finder/