A Simple Way to Upgrade Your Standalone or Clustered ESXi Servers

Mike Conjoice

Jan 4, 2017 • 1 min read

Important Note - update your VCSA before your ESXi Servers!

Open an SSH session to your ESXi server
Put your system into Maintenance Mode and allow the VMs to migrate or suspend
```
 esxcli system maintenanceMode set --enable true
```

Show available images from the VMware update server and select the one you require

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

The following line will enable http connections through the ESXi server firewall to allow the update to take place
```
 esxcli network firewall ruleset set -e true -r httpClient
```
Run the following command in the SSH session, replacing ESXi-6.0.0-20161104001-standard with the update package you require from step 3. This may take a while depending on download speed etc.
```
 esxcli software profile update -p ESXi-6.0.0-20161104001-standard -d https://hostupdate.vmware.com/software/VUM/PRODUCTION/main/vmw-depot-index.xml
```

Once complete, we can re-enable the firewall

 esxcli network firewall ruleset set -e false -r httpClient

Reboot your ESXi server with the reboot command
Once your server comes back up, we can now disable Maintenance Mode.
```
 esxcli system maintenanceMode set --enable true
```

Once complete, all you VMs should redistribute themselves (if you are running a DRS cluster) or resume and you can continue to upgrade the remaining hosts within your cluster.

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