Step 1

Download the ESXi Upgrade file called Offline Bundle from the VMware Portal. You need to have a valid Vmware login. I find the files are not easy to find. Here is the direct download link to VMware vSphere. The ESXi hypervisor is what you are looking for. There isn’t a difference between the Hypervisor Edition and ESXi. It is the same file.

VMware Hypervisor download page
ESXi Offline Bundle

Step 2

Upload the zip file to your ESXi host. There are two ways, use the web browser or an SCP client like WinSCP. I prefer the web browser method.

VMware Datastore Browser
Upload location

Step 3

Put the host in maintenance mode. The easiest way is to use the web browser. Right-click the host and choose ‘enter maintenance mode’. Prior to that, you need to move all VMs to another host or shutdown all VMs.

ESXi host maintenance mode web UI

Step 4

Now it is time to ssh into the host for the upgrade process using the command line. I use Putty (Windows) or Terminus (MAC) as my go-to ssh client.

By default, ssh is disabled on ESXi hosts. You need to start the service using the web GUI.

ESxi host ssh service

Step 5

It is also possible to put the host in maintenance mode using ssh, below is the command

esxcli system maintenanceMode set –enable true.

We need to locate the uploaded zip file in step 2 in order to identify the correct path naming. Type

cd /vmfs/volumes

This is the location where ESXi stores the datastores.

ESXi datastore location)

In the picture above you notice the ‘datastore’ is a symlink followed by the real path, which you see also at the bottom of the picture. Knowing this information we can now execute the upgrade command.

esxcli software sources profile list -d /vmfs/volumes//62ab518c-47c98334-f7ff-0cc47a6c43c4/VMware-ESXi-7.0U3d-19482537-depot.zip
ESXi profile image in the offline bundel

Here you see now all the profile images in the offline bundle. Which one shall I choose?

  • ESXi7-OU3d standard – Contains all patches
  • ESXi7-OU3d no-tools – Contains all patches but no VMware Tools
  • ESXi7-OU3ds-standard – Contains security patches only
  • ESXi7-OU3ds-no-tools – Contains security patches only and no VMware Tools

so the image profile with ‘s” are security patches only.

We want to install the standard image profile with all patches, In this case it is ESXi7-OU3d.

Please note for simplicity I didn’t write down the number

esxcli software profile update -d /vmfs/volumes/datastore1/VMware-ESXi-7.0.0-15843807-depot.zip -p ESXi-7.0U3d-19482537-standard

In case you have some hardware, which is no longer supported, you will get a warning message. See the command below to force the upgrade with the ‘–no-hardware-warning’ switch.

esxcli software profile update -d /vmfs/volumes//62ab518c-47c98334-f7ff-0cc47a6c43c4/VMware-ESXi-7.0U3d-19482537-depot.zip -p ESXi-7.0U3d-19482537-standard --no-hardware-warning

When the update is successful you will see this message

The update completed successfully, but the system needs to be rebooted for the changes to be effective.

Step 6 (last step for how to upgrade ESXi host)

Reboot the host using this command

reboot

You can also reboot the host from the web GUI. After the reboot, you should notice the new ESXi version number in the Web GUI. Please don’t forget to exit the host from the maintenance mode and also stop the ssh service. The ssh service should never run when you don’t need it. VMware will also indicate a warning in the GUI when the ssh service is running.

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