Updating ESXi 8 hosts from a depot file
Personal notes - I usually use Lifecycle Manager because it’s easy.
Download the depot file from somewhere (of course I mean the Broadcom portal, you dirty pirate.)
Upload the depot file to a host datastore of some kind, either through the web UI browser or with SCP.
user@pc:~$ scp VMware-ESXi-8.0U3-24022510-depot.zip user@hv0.mydomain.internal:/vmfs/volumes/<datastore>
You can either use esxcli remotely, or ssh into the host.
Determine which profiles are available from the depot with esxcli once it’s on accessible storage.
[user@hvx:~] esxcli software sources profile list --depot=/vmfs/volumes/<datastore>/VMware-ESXi-8.0U3-24022510-depot.zip
Name Vendor Acceptance Level Creation Time Modification Time
---------------------------- ------------ ---------------- ------------------- -----------------
ESXi-8.0U3-24022510-no-tools VMware, Inc. PartnerSupported 2024-06-11T13:40:11 2024-06-11T13:40:11
ESXi-8.0U3-24022510-standard VMware, Inc. PartnerSupported 2024-06-11T13:40:11 2024-06-11T13:40:11
If you haven’t already done so, enter maintenance mode.
[user@hvx:~] esxcli system maintenanceMode set --enable true
Update the host. Append --dry-run if you want to preview the result and see if a reboot is required, and append --no-hardware-warning if you’re getting warnings (e.g., future unsupported CPUs, like.. Skylake! Yay.)
[user@hvx:~] esxcli software profile update --depot=/vmfs/volumes/<datastore>/VMware-ESXi-8.0U3-24022510-depot.zip --profile=ESXi-8.0U3-24022510-standard
Once the update has been installed, reboot the host.
[user@hvx:~] esxcli system shutdown reboot --reason="System update to 8.0U3"
Confirm that the new profile is active.
[user@hvx:~] esxcli software profile get
I noticed that the output of software profile get has a little bug - maybe Broadcom laid off the person who wrote the version descriptions.
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The general availability release of VMware ESXi Server 8.0U2
brings whole new levels of virtualization performance to
datacenters and enterprises.