Manually upgrading ESXi 5.0 to ESXi 5.1

October 10, 2012 1 Comment

I finally got around to updating my ESXi server today. Since I don’t have the hardware to run vCenter and thus do not use it I had to do it the manual way. This method involves connecting via SSH but is relatively straightforward.

  1. Download the update from VMware. The following link should take you directly to your My VMware page: VMware
    1. The file should be named VMware-ESXi-<version>-depot.zip
  2. Suspend or shutdown any running VM’s and put the system into Maintainence mode.
  3. The next step is to enable SSH on your ESXi Server by going to Configuration > Security Profile > Properties. Start the SSH service and close the popup.
  4. From there you’ll want to upload the VMware-ESXi-<version>-depot.zip we downloading earlier to the server
  5. Once the zip has been uploaded, open Putty or your preferred SSH client and connect to the ESXi server.
  6. Log into the server from SSH and run the following command where <datastore> is the location of the zip we uploaded earlier and <version> is the version number of the file (in this case, ESXi-5.1.0-799733).
    1. esxcli software profile update -d /vmfs/volumes/<datastore>/VMware-ESXi-<version>-depot.zip -p ESXi-<version>-standard
  7. Once the process is finished reboot the sever. If the update was successful take the server our of Maintainence mode, and resume your VM’s.

You’ll probably have to update VMware Tools for your VM’s but your server should now be running properly on 5.1 ( or whatever version you upgraded to, assuming the command isn’t changed/removed).

Filed under Computing, Guide, Servers, Shortcuts, Tips, Updating, Virtualization, VMware Tagged with , , , , , ,

VMware Reference and shortcuts

October 7, 2012 Leave a comment

Auto-login vShpere Client shortcutvsphereshortcut

  • VpxClient.exe -i yes -s host -u user -p password
    • Auto-logins to the vSphere client with the specified host, username and password.

Convert disk from Thick to Thin Provisioning:

  • vmkfstools -i thick-disk-file thin-disk-file -d ‘thin’ -a lsilogic

Syslog

  1. http://kb.vmware.com/selfservice/microsites/search.do?language=en_US&cmd=displayKC&externalId=2003127
  • /usr/lib/vmware/vmsyslog/bin/vmsyslogd
    • to start syslog service
  • esxcli system syslog reload
    • to reload syslog service

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Convert a existing Virtual Disk on ESXi from Thick Provisioning to Thin Provisioning and vice versa

April 27, 2012 Leave a comment

I was playing around on my ESXi server and noticed most of my servers were using under 10GB yet most where consuming between 20-45GB of datastore space. This is because when I set them up I went with the default setting of Thick Provisioning like many. So what do you do? I don’t want to reinstall my servers and loose everything. I also don’t want to waste space when I can afford new disks being unemployed at the moment.  After searching around I came across 2 nice articles on using vmkfstools to “convert” (it actually is cloning the disks) to Thin Provision and vice versa.
Read more of this post

Filed under Computing, Guide, Servers, Shortcuts, Tips, Virtualization, VMware Tagged with , , , ,

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