I've just had a VMware ESXi 4.0 in front of me, which needed an upgrade.
Not a big deal if you're able to find the right KB articles on their
website...
OK, so here are the steps to upgrade a VMware ESXi 4.0 to a VMware ESXi
4.1 Update.
- Download and install the VMware Vsphere CLI
- Fire up a 'cmd'
- Navigate to the 'bin' folder of your vSphere CLI Installation (cd "C:\Program Files (x86)\VMware\VMware vSphere CLI\bin")
- Put the ESXi Server in Maintenance Mode
- Adjust & Execute the command below according to your environment
- Reboot the ESXi Server
- Get the ESXi Server out of the Maintenance Mode
vihostupdate.pl --server 192.168.1.100 --username root --password password -i -b "C:\upgrade-from-esxi4.0-to-4.1-update01-348481.zip"
Notes
- To monitor the progress of the installation, just connect through the vSphere GUI and watch the progressbar at the bottom. Please note, this only worked on some machines for me, not all!
- This procedure has been done on a Win7 64bit.
- The '--verbose' parameter isn't useful at all.. It doesn't show a progress-bar or similar, it's just a dump of the XML's sent over the line..
That's it already!
Cheers,
Raphi