As I recently wrote in a previous post about the ESXi virtualization lab setup, we needed to upgrade the host hypervisor from the originally installed 6.5.0 to 6.7 U2. Following the instructions on TinkerTry:
https://tinkertry.com/easy-update-to-latest-esxiThis site outlines simple easy to follow steps for upgrading a vSphere ESXi installation to the latest. However it should be noted that the following command simply did not work for my installation:
esxcli software profile update -p ESXi-6.7.0-20190402001-standard -d
https://hostupdate.vmware.com/software/VUM/PRODUCTION/main/vmw-depot-index.xmlThis command simply resulted in the download hanging. Network access to the Internet was not an issue, as:
esxcli software sources profile list --depot=https://hostupdate.vmware.com/
software/VUM/PRODUCTION/main/vmw-depot-index.xmlWorked to display the available updates, just fine, as well as the command
esxcli software profile update -p ESXi-6.7.0-20190402001-standard -d
https://hostupdate.vmware.com/software/VUM/PRODUCTION/main/vmw-depot-index.xml --dry-runproduced output which indicated that downloading the installation package itself was successful.
We were finally able to upgrade the lab by manually download the update package directly from VMware’s web site:
https://my.vmware.com/en/group/vmware/evalcenter?p=free-esxi6Once downloaded and the file has been uploaded to the host datastore, you can install via the command:
esxcli software profile update -p <profile name> -d <location of ZIP file>
esxcli software profile update -p ESXi-6.7.0-20190402001-standard -d <path to update.zip>The latest update includes mitigations for recent speculative execution side-channel attacks targeting Intel chips.