How to upgrade your home lab ESXi hosts to vSphere 5.5

After VMworld 2013 VMware announced vSphere 5.5 which has been made publicly available shortly afterwards.

Time to update our home labs.

Since i have a small number of ESXi hosts to take care of i don’t use Update Manager but i prefer to do it manually.

Download the update package from the VMware website (VMware-ESXi-5.5.0-133182 0-depot.zip) and place it on a VMFS datastore on the ESXi host you want to update.

Now let’s list the profiles included in the update package:

esxcli software sources profile list -d /vmfs/volumes/local_esxi/VMware-ESXi-5.5.0-133182 0-depot.zip

Name Vendor                          Acceptance              Level
---------------------------          ------------            ----------------
ESXi-5.5.0-1331820-standard          VMware, Inc.            PartnerSupported
ESXi-5.5.0-1331820-no-tools          VMware, Inc.            PartnerSupported

Let’s install the profile including the VMware Tools, but first let’s validate the package to make sure there won’t be any errors during the deployment.

esxcli software profile validate -d /vmfs/volumes/local_esxi/VMware-ESXi-5.5.0-1331820-depot.zip -p ESXi-5.5.0-1331820-standard

Happy with the result? Go ahead and update:

software profile update -d /vmfs/volumes/local_esxi/VMware-ESXi-5.5.0-1331820-depot.zip -p ESXi-5.5.0-1331820-standard

When prompted reboot your host and enjoy!

Please note that many desktop-like drivers have been removed from 5.1 to 5.5 so be aware some disk controllers might not work anymore after the update. In my host i had a secondary ASM1061 that is now unusable.

There is a way to perfom those command without donwloading the package locally but using it straight from the internet. I’ve never tried it but here’s an example about how to use it to list profiles on all updates from the VMware website:

esxcli software sources profile list -d https://hostupdate.vmware.com/software/vum/production/main/vmw-depot-index.xml