Every time a new version comes out, I have to dig up this procedure, so I figured I’d post it for quicker reference next time.
If you have a vSphere Update Manager in your environment, use it, if not, here is one method to update a host: (using ESXi-5.0.0-20120302001-standard.zip in this case)
- Locate the Offline Bundle with the desired version or create an image profile from it that includes additional vibs you may need.
- Copy that zip file to a datastore that the host to be upgraded has access to.
- Use the vSphere CLI on a local machine and vMA to run this command to determine the profiles contained in the bundle
esxcli --server=<host IP> --username=root --password=<password> software sources profile list --depot="[DATASTORE]ESXi-5.0.0-20120302001-standard.zip"
Returns “ESXi-5.0.0-20120302001-standard”, “ESXi-5.0.0-20120302001-no-tools”; we’re going to use “standard” in this case.
- Put the host in maintenance mode
vicfg-hostops.pl --server=<host IP> --username=root --password=<password> --operation enter
- Apply update to host using profile
esxcli --server=<host IP> --username=root --password=<password>software profile update --depot="[DATASTORE] update-from-esxi5.0-5.0_update01.zip" --profile="ESXi-5.0.0-20120302001-standard"
- Reboot the host
vicfg-hostops.pl --server=<host IP> --username=root --password=<password> --operation reboot
Hi
What is the difference between ‘ESXi-5.0.0-20120302001-standard’ and ‘ESXi-5.0.0-20120302001-no-tools’??
TIA
the “no-tools” profile does not include the VMware tools, making it smaller (and faster to load from auto-deploy). If you choose this option, you’ll not be able to install VMware Tools in VMs on this host. The work-around is to configure a Shared VMware Tools repository as described here:
http://blogs.vmware.com/vsphere/2012/03/setting-up-a-shared-vmware-tools-directory.html
Thanks for the clarification 🙂