Patching VMware vSphere (ESXi) with vCLI

I think that it is very important to have up to date our VMware vSphere (ESXi) systems, due to VMware periodically releases a series of patches which fixes bugs and security breaches on them.

For this purpose, we can use either vSphere Host Update Utility (graphical tool included within VMware vSphere package) or vihostupdate command, belonging to the vCLI (vSphere Command-Line Interface) enviroment, which allows us to perform several tasks (managing virtual machines, files, storages, users, etc.) remotely on VMware vSphere.

When I attempted to use vSphere Host Update Utility at work, I had problems because my PC is behind a proxy... In theory, you can set the ProxyServer tag into the settings.config file, but not working properly.

Then we are going to see how to apply a patch on VMware vSphere with vCLI. The tests will be realized on a Windows XP system, but do not worry because the commands are the same for Linux systems.

We must have installed the vCLI utility on our PC. I recommend to install vSphere CLI 4.1 version, because in this way we will be able to manage VMware vSphere 4.0 or 4.1. If we try to use vCLI 4.0 Update 1 or previous with VMware vSphere 4.1, we will get the following error: "This operation is NOT supported on 4.1.0 platform".

In this example, I am going to apply the lastest patch available (ESXi400-201009001) on a VMware vSphere 4.0 (update02) with 192.168.1.100 IP address.

First, we must open in a browser the web site with the patches available for VMware products: Download Patches. We can use the search tool to find them. In our case, we pick out the ESXi (Embedded and Installable) 4.0.0 product.

Then we access to a new screen with all patches released for our device, where we can see that they are ordered by date and version, and besides, we can take a look at their description, bulletins and classification.




In general, a patch includes one or more bulletins and it is important to know that the patches are cumulative, that is to say, a current patch contains all corrections of a previous release.

Next step is to download the patch. I usually drop it off into the same directory where are the vCLI Perl scripts.

C:\Archivos de programa\VMware\VMware vSphere CLI\bin>dir
El volumen de la unidad C no tiene etiqueta.
El número de serie del volumen es: A01F-3A26

Directorio de C:\Archivos de programa\VMware\VMware vSphere CLI\bin

28/10/2010  10:48    <DIR>          .
28/10/2010  10:48    <DIR>          ..
09/02/2010  15:59                49 .directory
20/04/2009  20:54             7.638 esxcfg-advcfg.pl
20/04/2009  20:54             8.214 esxcfg-cfgbackup.pl
20/04/2009  20:54             7.892 esxcfg-dns.pl
...
20/09/2010  04:14       184.519.878 ESXi400-201009001.zip
...

We must check out what bulletins included inside the patch can be applied to the VMware vSphere. In the present case, we figure out that there are two bulletins available.

C:\Archivos de programa\VMware\VMware vSphere CLI\bin>vihostupdate.pl --server 192.168.1.100 --scan --bundle ESXi400-201009001.zip
Enter username: root
Enter password:
The bulletins which apply to but are not yet installed on this ESX host are listed.

---------Bulletin ID---------   ----------------Summary-----------------
ESXi400-201009401-BG            Updates Firmware
ESXi400-201009402-BG            Updates VMware Tools

Now we are ready to run the order which will apply the updates. Before setting the patch, VMware vSphere must be put into maintenance mode. For that, we have to use the vSphere client and press the Enter Maintenance Mode option in the Summary tab.

C:\Archivos de programa\VMware\VMware vSphere CLI\bin>vihostupdate.pl --server 192.168.1.100 --install --bundle ESXi400-201009001.zip --bulletin ESXi400-201009401-BG,ESXi400-201009402-BG
Enter username: root
Enter password:
The update completed successfully, but the system needs to be rebooted for the changes to be effective.

The last step after rebooting the machine, is to make sure that the patch has been applied correctly.

C:\Archivos de programa\VMware\VMware vSphere CLI\bin>vihostupdate.pl --server 192.168.1.100 --query
Enter username: root
Enter password:
---------Bulletin ID--------- -----Installed----- ----------------Summary-----------------
ESXi400-Update02              2010-10-25T14:47:24 VMware ESXi 4.0 Update 2
ESXi400-201006203-UG          2010-10-25T14:47:24 VI Client update for 4.0 U2 release
ESXi400-201009401-BG          2010-10-25T15:18:23 Updates Firmware
ESXi400-201009402-BG          2010-10-25T15:18:23 Updates VMware Tools

Do not forget to exit Maintenance Mode and remember that we can also use this utility to upgrade a VMware vSphere from the 4.0 to 4.1 version.