How do you patch your ESXi 5 (Vsphere Hypervisor) Server?

[Zarathustra[H]]

It's absolutely insane to me that VMWare wants to charge for their auto update service.

I haven't thought much about patches to ESXi since I installed it, but I figured I probably should, with it being my edge device and all...

So I found this page on VMWares maze of a webpage, and punching in ESXi 5.0 gives me a whole page of patches.

1.) Is there any way to know which may ahve already been installed on my server or included with the install disk?

2.) How do I install them?

Once again another area in which VMWare seems to be making things unnecessarily complicated.

Thanks,
Matt

 

[NetJunkie]

What do you mean charge? Update Manager is part of every licensed version. If you're complaining that it's not part of the free version..well, it's not. It's part of vCenter and you don't get that with free. So you manually install patches. You can use the esxcli command to check installed updates and patch your hosts.

 

[Zarathustra[H]]

What do you mean charge? Update Manager is part of every licensed version. If you're complaining that it's not part of the free version..well, it's not

This isn't the early 90s. ALL software has (or at least should have) and update function in it today.

Every current version of linux, BSD, Mac OS or even Windows has an included update tool.

Heck, even individual pieces of software do, and even most games.

To me this just means that the free version of ESXi is a broken/incomplete product.

It is kind of shameful in this day and age that VMWare would release even a free version of their software requiring users to manually download, and import patches one by one.

 

[NetJunkie]

What's the update like in the free version of Windows? Oh..yeah..there isn't one. Free version of RedHat with update? Oh yeah...there isn't one. Free version of OSX? Oh yeah..there isn't one. What's your point here?

vSphere isn't an open source product. It's a commercially licensed product. The free version is good for dev/test/lab. It's unsupported. It's stripped down. You also really can't patch the free version automatically anyway since you can't evacuate the hosts and put it in maintenance mode.

 

[Zarathustra[H]]

What's the update like in the free version of Windows? Oh..yeah..there isn't one. Free version of RedHat with update? Oh yeah...there isn't one. Free version of OSX? Oh yeah..there isn't one. What's your point here?

vSphere isn't an open source product. It's a commercially licensed product. The free version is good for dev/test/lab. It's unsupported. It's stripped down. You also really can't patch the free version automatically anyway since you can't evacuate the hosts and put it in maintenance mode.

My point is that all software out there, free or not, has an update tool of some kind... Even pfSense does (though it doesn't seem to work well)

It's just astonishing to me that there isn't something like BSD's ports, Debian's Apt, or suse's Yast to manage system upgrades.

Mind blown.

I guess it shouldn't surprise me though. VMWare seems to try to obfuscate things as much as possible at every turn. Even navigating their webpage and trying to figure out what tools you need to download is one of the worst experiences of any company webpage ever.

They probably try to unnecessarily complicate things so that they can sell consulting services to hapless IT departments...

 

[NetJunkie]

Well, I don't speak for VMware but I'm sorry that their absolutely free product doesn't meet your requirements.

EDIT: As for what you need, just go grab the 5.0U1 rollup patch released last week. You'll be current in one command.

 

[Zarathustra[H]]

Well, I don't speak for VMware but I'm sorry that their absolutely free product doesn't meet your requirements.

Don't get me wrong, I appreciate the fact that there is a free product to use, but at the same time some of their design decisions make little or no sense, and are frustrating enough to drive you up a wall.

It's probably due to the fact that their competition is years behind from a technical standpoint. Once the competition catches up, they will likely be forced to address some of this stuff better.

EDIT: As for what you need, just go grab the 5.0U1 rollup patch released last week. You'll be current in one command.

Appreciated. I will look into this.

 

[NetJunkie]

The design decision here is very simple. The tool for updates is Update Manager, which is a plugin to vCenter. To support the free version would require an entirely different tool be used and tested. There is no financial reason to do that. There would be no revenue generated from it.

Pretty sure I've seen scripts out there to patch the free version.

 

[nate1280]

Download your patches, and copy em to a data store.

In the vSphere Client, enable SSH access, and power down all currently active VMs, and enter maintenance mode.

Logon to your ESXi server using putty (or your choice of SSH client), using root username with the password you set.

The following command will apply the update-from-esxi5.0-5.0_update01 patch, which will bring you to 5.0u1. And lets say your datastore happens to be called, datastore1

esxcli software vib update --depot=/vmfs/volumes/datastore1/update-from-esxi5.0-5.0_update01.zip

Wait till its finished, then reboot, and exit out of maintenance mode, and power your VMs back up. Don't forget to also get the updated vSphere Client.

For some more reading:

http://communities.vmware.com/peopl.../15/updating-esxi-5--single-use-esxcli-how-to

The commands used are issued in a vMA, hence the --server, and --username switches. The above command I used is for using directly on the server.

Oh, and if you're not sure where to download the patches directly, browse to the following:

http://www.vmware.com/patchmgr/download.portal

Patching is pretty easy Just did this yesterday on a TS430 with ESXi 5, quick and painless.

 

[Zarathustra[H]]

Download your patches, and copy em to a data store.

In the vSphere Client, enable SSH access, and power down all currently active VMs, and enter maintenance mode.

Logon to your ESXi server using putty (or your choice of SSH client), using root username with the password you set.

The following command will apply the update-from-esxi5.0-5.0_update01 patch, which will bring you to 5.0u1. And lets say your datastore happens to be called, datastore1

esxcli software vib update --depot=/vmfs/volumes/datastore1/update-from-esxi5.0-5.0_update01.zip

Wait till its finished, then reboot, and exit out of maintenance mode, and power your VMs back up. Don't forget to also get the updated vSphere Client.

For some more reading:

http://communities.vmware.com/peopl.../15/updating-esxi-5--single-use-esxcli-how-to

The commands used are issued in a vMA, hence the --server, and --username switches. The above command I used is for using directly on the server.

Oh, and if you're not sure where to download the patches directly, browse to the following:

http://www.vmware.com/patchmgr/download.portal

Patching is pretty easy Just did this yesterday on a TS430 with ESXi 5, quick and painless.

Thank you!

What is the preferred method to transfer files to the datastore? Can I wget them (or something similar) from inside the ESXi console? I mean, ESXi doesn't recognize USB storage, so I can't put the patches on a thumb drive.

Thanks,
Matt

 

[nate1280]

Thank you!

What is the preferred method to transfer files to the datastore? Can I wget them (or something similar) from inside the ESXi console? I mean, ESXi doesn't recognize USB storage, so I can't put the patches on a thumb drive.

Thanks,
Matt

Just download it on your desktop, and using vSphere Client, upload it to the data store. If its network storage, can copy it that way to, whichever way works for how your system is configured.

As an example, I have a NFS share on a windows server that contains ISOs, so I just copied it via RDP to the folder, and went from there.

 

[NetJunkie]

Yeah, that's one reason I like NFS. Did a manual update the other day and just copied the file to a NFS datastore from my Mac.

 

[danswartz]

Just so I'm 100% sure, we are talking about this?

update-from-esxi5.0-5.0_update01

 

[Martian]

Don't forget to also get the updated vSphere Client.

It doesn't look like you can update vSphere unless you have a license unless I'm missing something.

 

[dashpuppy]

Yeah, that's one reason I like NFS. Did a manual update the other day and just copied the file to a NFS datastore from my Mac.

one of the bummers of iscsi

 

[Zarathustra[H]]

Yeah, that's one reason I like NFS. Did a manual update the other day and just copied the file to a NFS datastore from my Mac.

My problem here is that my file server is running in my ESXi host, so I can't really use it to provide my NFS file stores to my ESXi host

Besides, for compatibility sake, I run all SAMBA rather than NFS.

 

[lopoetve]

This isn't the early 90s. ALL software has (or at least should have) and update function in it today.

Every current version of linux, BSD, Mac OS or even Windows has an included update tool.

Heck, even individual pieces of software do, and even most games.

To me this just means that the free version of ESXi is a broken/incomplete product.

It is kind of shameful in this day and age that VMWare would release even a free version of their software requiring users to manually download, and import patches one by one.

All of those are charge, or OSS. There's not a free closed-source product out there (unless you're looking at shareware) that has a built in update tool that I can think of (feel free to correct me).

That being said, it's a hypervisor, not an OS, or really a piece of software. You can use the esxcli to tell it to pull from the web as well, if you'd like (at least you could before - I have VC), but it's way more involved than just "patching" a game - there's drivers, firmware, etc that all could potentially have impact in there. You're expected to have read the release notes first too

Update manager is WAY more than just patches - that's why it's a licensed feature. It automates, auto-balances, handles VMs that cant' migrate, migrates as needed, works with FT/HA, DPM, DRS, etc... It's not just "patch my host" button.

Don't get me wrong, I appreciate the fact that there is a free product to use, but at the same time some of their design decisions make little or no sense, and are frustrating enough to drive you up a wall.

It's probably due to the fact that their competition is years behind from a technical standpoint. Once the competition catches up, they will likely be forced to address some of this stuff better.
.

The design decisions make perfect sense to the standard customer - enterprise environments. There you have VC, UM, VCOPS, etc - all licensed features that make management (which is the whole point) possible and incredibly simple. No reason to pay if all of that was just handed to you, though - hence why the free version is stripped down. They're also way more than just basic management or patching tools though.

As for the competition... heh.

[QUOTE='Zarathustra[H]

I guess it shouldn't surprise me though. VMWare seems to try to obfuscate things as much as possible at every turn. Even navigating their webpage and trying to figure out what tools you need to download is one of the worst experiences of any company webpage ever.
[/QUOTE]

Other than downloading the free ISO, you shouldn't really ahve to go to the vmware site, unless you want powercli too, or a driver cd - all the rest are built in to ESX What were you looking for you had trouble finding?

 

[thedge]

My point is that all software out there, free or not, has an update tool of some kind... Even pfSense does (though it doesn't seem to work well)

It's just astonishing to me that there isn't something like BSD's ports, Debian's Apt, or suse's Yast to manage system upgrades.

Mind blown.

I guess it shouldn't surprise me though. VMWare seems to try to obfuscate things as much as possible at every turn. Even navigating their webpage and trying to figure out what tools you need to download is one of the worst experiences of any company webpage ever.

They probably try to unnecessarily complicate things so that they can sell consulting services to hapless IT departments...

Except VMware doesnt need ports, apt, yast, etc. ESX is an appliance, a tool. Youre a short step away from saying your BIOS should have an internal update engine in it, or an ipod needs to have that.

 

[nate1280]

It doesn't look like you can update vSphere unless you have a license unless I'm missing something.

You can download the vsphere client (that runs on your local desktop) for free, its needed to connect to the ESXi machine to do anything. At least I was able to, going through the normal downloads.