How to upgrade ESXi 6.0 to ESXi 6.5 using esxcli

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How to upgrade ESXi 6.0 to ESXi 6.5 using esxcli - logo

In the last post, we upgraded ESXi using Interactive Installer https://www.wojcieh.net/how-to-upgrade-esxi-6-0-to-esxi-6-5-using-interactive-installer/. In Today post I will guide you through updating ESXi using esxcli.

Prerequisites

Fortunately for us, we just need to download ESXi Offline Bundle from VMware site. Once it is downloaded we can start to upgrade ESXi 6.0 to ESXi 6.5 using esxcli.

  1. The first step is to upload Offline Bundle to datastore ESXi can access.

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  2. Upload the zipped file to datastore.

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  3. Open your favorite SSH client and login to ESXi. Go to datastore where ESXi Offline Bundle is located.

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  4. To safely proceed with an upgrade I suggest to put ESXi in maintenance mode. To do it use this command
esxcli system maintenanceMode set --enable on
  1. To check what packages will be upgraded it is suggested to to test upgrade. In order to do it we can perform “dry run” upgrade.
    esxcli software vib update --depot=/vmfs/volumes/NFSCompute/ESXi650-201704001.zip --dry-run
    
  2. To update ESXi simply remove -dry-run option and wait.

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  3. The last step is to reboot ESXi host. After few minutes we have fully functional upgraded ESXi 6.5

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Summary

In this post, I showed how to upgrade ESXi 6.0 to ESXi 6.5 using esxcli.