Tag: Patch

[VMWare] Get and upgrade ESXi 6.5 "offline" - without paid license

As I wanted to have a very recent version of ESXi, I went to VMWares website and checked out their Products, Free Products, vSphere Hypervisor section. This, however, only presented me with a ESXi 6.5.0a ISO from 02.02.2017 - too old. However, you'll get the much needed free license - so the visit pays off :).

So to get the latest version and updates, you need to go to http://vmware.com/go/evaluate-vsphere-en - and are presented with the 6.5.0 U1 ISO from 27.07.2017 - a lot better. With said image you can then install your server. Even if you had an old 6.5.0a install, you could download the VMware vSphere Hypervisor (ESXi) Offline Bundle - which will upgrade your old 6.5.0 installation to U1 from that site.

After that, you'll need to check out the very useful VMWare ESXi Patch Tracker on https://esxi-patches.v-front.de/ESXi-6.5.0.html. There you can see, which patches are needed to get your ESXi host to the latest version (in my case I only need to apply the 2017-10-05 patch series to get from U1 to latest). So now switch over to https://my.vmware.com/group/vmware/patch#search and look for ESXi 6.5.0 patches. I did find my needed ESXi650-201710001 patch with release date 05.10.2017 - and downloaded it. From the ESXi Patch Tracker I now know, that the Imageprofile of said Update is called ESXi-6.5.0-20171004001-standard and uses the Buildnumber 6765664. I then enabled SSH on the ESXi Host, shutdown all VMs, put the ESXi Host into Maintance mode and uploaded the ESXi650-201710001.zip to a folder on my Datastore datastore01 into a folder I created called ESXiUpdate.

After that, I could execute said update via SSH with the command esxcli software profile update --depot="[datastore01]ESXiUpdate/ESXi650-201710001.zip" --profile ESXi-6.5.0-20171004001-standard

As you can see, it needs to provide the path to the patch file, as well as the Imageprofilename we found out earlier via the ESXi Patch Tracker. After the successful installation, a reboot is need.

As soon as the machine has booted again, login and check if the Buildnumber now matches the Updates Buildnumber. If this is true, disable the Maintenance Mode, restart the VMs and you're good to go.

If other patches need to be applied, you would re-enable SSH  access, not restart the VMs and not disable the Maintenance Mode and just keep on uploading and applying the updates :).

More infos abot the esxcli commands can be found here - and you can still use your free license with ESXi 6.5 which you acquired at the first steps of this weblog - even if you use the most recent patch (luckily!).

And now, get those machines patched ;)!