Ben Kevan’s Blog

Installing Patches on your ESX Server

VMWare releases patches for ESX quite often, and it can get tiring installing them all the time one by one. So I wrote a wiki for the methods I use, which cut down the time of installation (for me having 20+ production hosts) quite a-bit.

Here is the link:
http://www.benkevan.com/wiki/index.php/Installing_Patches_on_ESX_Server

Here’s a little excerpt from it:

Install Released Patches

To install patches released by VMWare download them and transfer them to your esx server
scp -r patchrootdir user@server:/tmp/patches

ssh into your ESX server with your local ESX server account.
ssh servername

One you are on the host change user to root
su -

If you copied over the zip files change directory to the patches location and unzip all the patches
cd /tmp/patches
for i in *.zip; do unzip $i; done; rm *.zip

Now install the patches
for j in ESX*; do cd $j; esxupdate –noreboot update; cd ..; done
Note: If there are dependancies and not all of them are install just run the command above twice.

Tags: esx, VMWare