Patching VM Hosts without Update Manager
In the unfortunate event that you have been tasked with updating VMware hosts without having or using Update Manager, here are the necessary steps to do so.
Ensure that you have VMware CLI (downloaded from here – https://preview.tinyurl.com/29h9tfw ) installed, as it is THE requirement.
Ensure that you have downloaded all necessary VMware patches from here – https://preview.tinyurl.com/6t6clos as this is really step one in this process.
Ensure that you have the VSphere Client installed onto your system.
From here we need to copy the patches into the local datastore of the VMware host through the VSphere Client. Once we have all patches onto the host, we can move forward with the updates.
Launch the VMware CLI, and run the following command – esxcli –server=10.10.10.10 –username=root software vib update –depot=/vmfs/volumes/datastore1/ESXi500-201109001.zip
Repeat running this command for all necessary updates that you copied to the host earlier.
Once all updates have been completed, run the following command – vicfg-hostops –server 10.10.10.10 –operation reboot
Once the reboot is complete all updates will have taken affect, and you are complete.
Sam Westfall, PEI
