How to Patch a Standalone ESXi Host

In this video, we show you how to patch a standalone ESXi host Unless you are managing a VMware ESXi server through vCenter then the hypervisor will be a standalone server And to update and patch a standalone server we need to run a command from the CLI to apply a patch we download from VMware Useful links: https://customerconnect.vmware.com/patch https://docs.vmware.com/en/VMware-vSphere/7.0/rn/vsphere-esxi-vcenter-server-70-release-notes.html https://esxi-patches.v-front.de/ ===================================== Support the channel: Buy Me a Coffee - https://buymeacoffee.com/dmckone Donate to the channel - https://paypal.me/DavidMcKone Become a monthly contributor on Patreon - https://www.patreon.com/dmckone ===================================== Steps taken 1) Download patch Point your web browser to the following URL and login to your VMware account https://customerconnect.vmware.com/patch Now, from the "Select a Product" drop down menu select ESXi (Embedded and installable) By default this will be set for the latest major version, which at the time of recording is 7.0, but you can change this in the drop down menu Click the Search button and it will return all patches that are available for that version If it's too recent, then it's usually not a good idea to install it because when developers fix code, there is always the risk they'll create a new bug Choose the patch you'll use, then click on the Download Now button to download the zip file NOTE: Web browsers like Brave will result in an error message. You have to disable the Shield to allow cookies, trackers, etc. Basically, VMware will restrict download access if you disable analytics 2) Upload patch to ESXi The next thing to do is to upload the patch to a datastore the hypervisor has access to In this example, we'll use the local storage Login to your ESXi server, click on Storage and then select the Datastore Copy and paste the location details for this datastore as we'll need this later Click Datastore browser, then click Upload Select the depot file you downloaded and click Open Once the upload is complete you can click the Close button 3) Shutdown VMs Because we are carrying out maintenance, gracefully shutdown any VMs that are running on this server 4) Connect using SSH To apply the patch we need to open a remote console to the server using SSH Click on Host then from the Actions menu select Services | Enable Secure Shell (SSH) Now connect to the server using SSH and login as root 5) Pre-stage patch Next we'll run a command to pre-stage the patch, but we need to know the image profile name In my case we're installing 7.0U3c and you can find this on the website but it also tells us this in the filename, VMware-ESXi-7.0U3c-19193900-depot.zip As this is a standard edition of VMware we're running, we'll use ESXi-7.0U3c-19193900-standard for this patch release Now, if we'd opted for 7.0U2d instead it would be ESXi-7.0U2d-18538813-standard We also need the location of the patch, which hopefully you copied in a previous step The command for me to then run is as follows esxcli software profile update -p ESXi-7.0U3c-19193900-standard -d /vmfs/volumes/60081218-95c16d94-3698-1418774a8f18/VMware-ESXi-7.0U3c-19193900-depot.zip --no-hardware-warning The last parameter is optional and is to disable the hardware warning as I already know about a CPU support risk 6) Reboot and update server At this stage the patch isn't applied and it requires a reboot As a best practice you should now put the server into Maintenance mode first Back in the ESXi GUI, click Host then click Actions and select Enter maintenance mode This is to make sure the server comes up in a stable state and VMs aren't started as soon as it's ready As long as no VMs are running, reboot the server by clicking the Reboot option Once the server is back up, login into the GUI and click Host You should now see the version has changed, due to the upgrade You can now disable maintenance mode by clicking Actions and selecting Exit maintenance mode The server is now updated and ready to use Credits: LoveLife | Instrumental Prod. Blue Mango | EQMUSEQ.COM by Don Da Vinci https://soundcloud.com/eqmuseq/lovelife?in=eqmuseq/sets/royalty-free-music-for-youtube patch esxi host,patch esxi 7,patch esxi 7 command line,patch esxi host without vcenter,patch esxi host cli,patch esxi host manually,patch esxi host without update manager,how to patch esxi 7,how to patch esxi 7.0,how to patch esxi 7 without update manager,how to patch esxi host,how to patch esxi host step by step,how to patch vmware esxi 7.0,how to patch vmware esxi,how to manually patch esxi,how to manually patch esxi host,patch standalone esxi host,esxi,vmware How to Patch a Standalone ESXi Host 00:00 Intro 00:32 Download patch from VMware 07:40 Upload patch to ESXi 09:22 Shutdown VMs 10:00 Enable SSH service 12:07 Pre-stage patch 16:42 Maintenance mode and reboot 18:55 Undo maintenance mode