How to update your VMware ESXi 6.x to 6.5.0a, Online Mode

Today I would like to show you how to easily update your VMware ESXi 6.5.0 with build number 4564106 to the latest version 6.5.0a with build number 4887370. You can read the VMware ESXi 6.5.0a Released Noted from here.

Also, you can see the ESXi Version 6.5.0 History to get more information about all releases in the future.

There are 2 ways to update your ESXi host.

• Offline mode: you need to download an updated ISO image and somehow (with iDRAC, IPMI, KVM, iLO, or whatever) mount it to your ESXi host or transfer it to the datastore and use the command line to update your server
• Online mode: which is more convenient and without any trouble, you use one command to update your server from VMware depot, Yes only one command!

In this post, I will only talk about online mode, however, I will write another post about offline mode soon.

Before you start:

• Make sure you have backup from your VMs, not only the purpose of this update but having a good backup is one of the most important parts of your infrastructure and the big challenge that you always facing. In another post, I would like to talk about my favorite backup solution as well.
• Always good to check if your hardware is compatible with the version of ESXi. You can take a deep look at the VMware Compatibility Guide to make sure your hardware is compatible or not!
• Obviously, your server has to have an internet connection.
• Make sure you have downtime; the update requires a host reboot.

How to Update:

In this case, for the update we going to use VMware CLI, so I will write the procedure step by step and you will find commands that you can easily copy and paste into your SSH client of choice and run them.

• Put your host into maintenance mode.

• Open SSH session to your ESXi host server with your SSH client of choice like PuTTY. First, you need to enable SSH service in your ESXi web client. Navigate to Host > Manage > Services and start service TMS-SSH.

• We want to see the current software version and build number, so run the command below to Determine:

vmware -vl

• You can run the following command to see the list of all available ESXi profiles:

esxcli software sources profile list --depot=https://hostupdate.vmware.com/software/VUM/PRODUCTION/main/vmw-depot-index.xml

• Probably your ESXi firewall (by default) rejects HTTP connection, so first, we need to enable the firewall rule to allow for web traffic:

esxcli network firewall ruleset set -e true -r httpClient

• Download the ESXi image and run the script to update ESXi automatically with one single command, it may take several minutes to complete and you will see nothing during the update, so be calm and get a cup of coffee:

esxcli software profile update -p ESXi-6.5.0-20170104001-standard -d https://hostupdate.vmware.com/software/VUM/PRODUCTION/main/vmw-depot-index.xml

After the update is finished, you will see a screen like this, which means that you have successfully updated your ESXi host to the latest version.

• Now time to disallow web traffic again as before “recommended”.

esxcli network firewall ruleset set -e false -r httpClient

• At the end, you need to exit maintenance mode and as part of the required step reboot the host with the command or from the web client.

You can see the build number changed to the target build number and also you can run the command vmware –vl again to see your build number.

Done!

Test your connectivity and make sure all of your VMs are running again after reboot. That was pretty easy! Right?

Let me know your opinion and write down any questions or comments.

26 Feb 2017 Update:

My post regarding update the ESXi hypervisor in offline mode.