Monthly Archives: May 2011

Upgrading VMWare vSphere Hypervisor (ESXi) 4.1 to 4.1 Update 1 through SSH

I upgraded VMWare vSphere Hypervisor (ESXi) 4.1 to 4.1 Update 1 through ssh, and here’s the way.

First, you must enable SSH by the console or vSphere Client. The following web page shows the detail process for it, but I have not set up the non-root user yet.

ESXi (ESX 4i) Enable SSH

After that, you can login as root user (if you’ve set up non-root user, use it).

$ ssh root@esxi-server-ip

To enter the maintenance mode, shutdown all virtual machines. I don’t know the way of shutting down all at once, and execute the command many times.

# vim-cmd vmsvc/power.shutdown <vmid>

You can use this command in order to know the vmid.

# vim-cmd vmsvc/getallvms

Enter the maintenance mode.

# vim-cmd hostsvc/maintenance_mode_enter

Download the update file (update-from-esxi4.1-4.1_update01.zip), and send it by SCP. Since ESXi server, however, doesn’t have ‘unzip’ program, I unzipped the files on my Mac and send the directory.

$ scp -r update-from-esxi4 root@esxi-server-ip:/vmfs/volumes/Your-Data-Storage-Name

You can check the data storage name by the command `ls /vmfs/volumes/`.

The preparation step is done, and go!

# cd /vmfs/volumes/Your-Data-Storage-Name/update-from-esxi4
# esxupdate update -m metadata.zip

After updated, you must exit maintenance mode and reboot the machine.

# vim-cmd hostsvc/maintenance_mode_exit
# reboot

Finally, you can check the current version of Hypervisor by the following command.

# vmware -v
VMware ESXi 4.1.0 build-348481

References