Patching esxi5.0

Recently new patch was released by VMware to fix iSCSI problem. How to apply patch is explained here

Few notes on patching.

1. No command-line utility can upgrade an older ESX or ESXi host to 5.0.
2. ESXi 5.0 hosts can be patched and upgraded (e.g. ESXi5.1)  with the vCLI command-line esxcli tool.
3. The esxupdate and vihostupdate tools are no longer supported for ESXi 5.0 updates.
4. The vmware-vmupgrade.exe tool should not be used to upgrade VMs anymore.

ESXCLI–new scripting tool of vsphere 5.0

With vsphere 5.0 new scripting tool is introduced. It is one of the simplest scripting commands I have ever seen. It has some resemblance with powershell. Every thing has option and made into get/set style commands. Being a powershell fan, I’m loving it

Let’s find the ESX version. First enable ESXi shell. You can enable it from vCenter or from DCUI. Easiest way is vCenter

Let’s find the vmware version. Type in following command

esxcli system version get

you want to learn the options under esxcli system, just type in

esxcli system

To check the CPU details type in

esxcli hardware cpu list

In below example we brought down one of the nic but you do not get any confirmation.

esxcli network nic down -n=vmnic

It was at least expected to output “command was successful” but for some reason it is not doing so. So in order to confirm it, I have to run another command

esxcli network nic list