If you’re running VMWare ESXi on a single host, you can’t update through vSphere so you need to do it by yourself.
Introduction
Validated on
This how-to have been tested and known to work, but not limited to the following versions
- ESXi 8
Prerequisite
- Root access to ESXi
- Access to VMWare ESXi offline bundle file (Download link below)
- SSH software
- macOS, you can use Terminal
- Linux, you can use Terminal
- Windows, I do recommend you to use PuTTY
Download VMWare ESXi offline bundle
First you need to download the latest VMWare ESXi offline bundle file.
Now when you have downloaded latest ESXi let’s get started.
Set host in maintenance mode
Click Host in the left menu -> Actions on the right -> Click on Enter maintenance mode in the dropdown
You will get a pop-up where you need to confirm that you want to put the host in maintenance mode, click Yes
Now you can see that the host have entered maintenance mode
Upload VMWare ESXi offline bundle
Now it’s time to upload VMWare ESXi offline bundle file that you did download earlier
In the left menu click on -> datastore1 (your datastore might be named differently) -> Datastore browser
Click on Upload file and then select VMWare ESXi offline bundle file that you did download earlier to upload it. If you look at the left side of the window you will see a progress bar
Execute update command
Now it’s time to start the update, as far as I know you need to do this through SSH. So, you need to enable SSH on the host.
Click on Host in the left menu -> Actions at the right -> Services in the dropdown -> Enable Secure Shell SSH
Now you need to connect to the host, you can do that with the Terminal in macOS or Linux, for Windows I can recommend you to download Putty
Let’s see what profiles that are located on our update, to do that you can write the following command. Remember to replace path after
--depot=to your own pathesxcli software sources profile list --depot=/vmfs/volumes/datastore1/Update/VMware-ESXi-8.0U2b-23305546-depot.zip
What you want is the update with both patch and security updates, choose ESXi-8.0U2b-23305546-standard
Now it’s time to run the update, if you get error in return like me, I’ll go through how to solve it below. To start the update, execute the update execute the following command. And remember to change path to your own after
--depot=esxcli software profile update --depot=/vmfs/volumes/datastore1/Update/VMware-ESXi-8.0U2b-23305546-depot.zip --profile=ESXi-8.0U2b-23305546-standard
If you did get in to any errors, you can fix it by following the steps below, if you did not get any errors you can skip the step below and go to “Exit maintenance mode”
If you get into any errors
Sometimes it happens that you will run into errors, so I’ll go through the usual fixes below.
First step is to make sure that cache is activated
Click on Host in left menu -> System -> Swap Edit settings
Make sure that everything looks like the picture below (Datastore1 might be named differently on your host)
Reboot your ESXi host
Now do the steps in “Execute update command” again If you still getting errors you need to delete everything in the /tmp folder, follow the steps below.
To delete everything in /tmp type the following command
rm -rf /tmp/*
You can verify that the /tmp folder is empty by executing the following commands
cd /tmp ls
Reboot your ESXi host
Now, try to run the update commands once again from “Execute update command”
If you don’t get into any errors after you have run the update command it should look something like this
Now it’s time to reboot the host
esxcli system shutdown reboot --reason "Updated ESXi"
Exit maintenance mode
Now when the host has rebooted you need to exit maintenance mode if it still is in maintenance mode, do that by click on Host in left menu -> Actions to the right and then Exit maintenance mode in the dropdown menu.
Conclusion
Now everything is finished and you ESXi host should be updated.