Online Upgrade to ESXi 6.5 Using ESXCLi – VirtuBytes

This beautiful article from virtubytes.com helps to upgrade Vcenter without having a login for vmware’s website.

Let’s start with that overview on image profiles and how to distinguish them in the online depot. This information could have easily been a post in itself, but if you are new to image profiles and the online depot, it may prove beneficial to be all in one place. If you already know the deal, feel free to skip ahead.

Image Profiles – An image profile is a set of VIBs grouped to make a full installation of ESXi. VMware issues a collection of these image profiles with each update release of ESXi. Typically, you will see between two to four variations for each patch or update. The collections consist of a standard image profile and a no-tools image profile. The no-tools profile does not include VMware Tools, is usually lighter, has less memory overhead, and PXE boots quicker.
Naming Format for Image Profile – ESXi-<ABC>-<YYYYMMRRSSS>[s]

A = Major ESXi Version; B = Minor ESXi Version; YYYY = Release Year; MM = Release Month; RR = Release Code; SSS = Release Sequence; s = Flag for Security Only Image Profile

Example of Image Profiles for ESXi-6.5
- ESXi-6.5.0-4564106-standard | Includes all patches (GA release of ESXi 6.5.0)
- ESXi-6.5.0-20170404001-standard | Includes all patches (ESXi 6.5d)
- ESXi-6.5.0-20170404001-no-tools | Contains all patches; no VMware Tools (ESXi 6.5d)
- ESXi-6.5.0-20170301001s-standard | Contains security patches only
- ESXi-5.5.0-20170301001s-no-tools | Contains security patches only; no VMware Tools

For more information on image profiles, check out this VMware KB.

For VMware ESXi versioning, check out this Patch Tracker.

Now that’s out of the way, let’s get started with the update!

Put Host in Maintenance Mode

If you have virtual machines running on the specified host, ensure they are migrated off or shutdown.

Next, enable SSH and connect to the host. Once logged onto the host, run the vim-cmdhostsvc/maintenance_mode_enter command to put the host in maintenance mode.

Enable Firewall Ruleset

After the ESXi host has successfully entered maintenance mode, run the firewall command to enable the httpClient.

esxcli network firewall ruleset set -e true -r httpClient

Select and Update Image Profile

With the firewall ports open for http requests, we’ll run the esxcli software command to browse image profiles available in the depot. The command will also search for strings containing ESXi 6.5 to narrow down the results.