Applying the ESXi600-201510001 patch without Update Manager (single host)

VMware had recently released ESXi 6.0 Update 1 (and ESXi 5.5 Update 3) but there was an issue with snapshots that would hang the guest VM (which is obviously not ideal).  So, VMware released ESXi 6.0 Update 1a to resolve that issue while at the same time resolving the security issues the update originally addressed.  Dell has not released their customized ISO yet.  Because I am currently without Update Manager on my primary ESXi host (Lenovo TS140), I will have to update my Dell R710 as a single host w/o update manager.  There are a couple different ways to do this but I am going to stick to the method I normally use in this situation:

  1. Upload the update you’re trying to apply to a folder on a datastore ([Internal-ESX2]\Patches\ESXi600-201510001.zip in this case)
  2. Sign in to your host and shutdown all VMs on it
  3. Enable SSH on the host if it isn’t already and connect to it with your favorite SSH client as the root user
  4. Change the current directory to the one with your update using # cd /vmfs/volumes/Internal-ESX2/Patches/
  5.  Install the update using the following command  # esxcli software vib install -d
    “/vmfs/volumes/Internal-ESX2/Patches/ESXi600-201510001.zip”  (we’re using the -d switch because the update is a zip file.  If it’s a VIB file we’ll use -v instead)
  6. The console will go still for a while as the update is applied (this patch is 350MB)
  7. You should see the summary of all packages updated as a result of the update:
    ESXi 6.0 Update 1a Patch

Notice at the top of the huge text wall that the “update completed successfully, but the system needs to be rebooted…”  Yep, you guessed it, we have to reboot the host for the update to take effect which is expected with such a significant patch.  You can initiate a host reboot by simply typing “reboot” from within the SSH window.

That’s it!  It’s that easy – now your single host is updated with the latest patch.  Hope this was useful!

 

Author: Jon

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1 Comment

  1. Hi.

    Thanks for sharing.

    Could you please let me know what is specific with Dell ISO updates in comparison with regular VMware updates ?

    Regards,

    Post a Reply

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