ESXi / vSphere 6.0 General Availability Offline Depot

VMware released vSphere 6.0 to GA (General Availability) on 3/12/15. If you want to upgrade you can pretty easily go to the VMware site and download the appropriate files. What is missing however is a Offline Depot for that who want to perform a in-place upgrade. It seems that VMware has chosen to only make the Depot available to those that have purchased a license for vSphere 6.0. I’m sure in time they will change this but until then I’ll be making the Offline Depot available for download here.

Offline Depot via Mega [Resumable]

Name: VMware-ESXi-6.0.0-2494585-depot.zip
Release Date: 2015-03-12
Build Number: 2494585

MD5SUM: bebc48450b9743c56073602931d63600
SHA1SUM: 79bf372bb7cd70bbbf2dd5f5819a7830468e2b7e

Otherwise, head to My VMware and get upgraded. You can see my previous post on upgrading with a Offline Depot here.

Update: Patching VMWare ESXi 5.1

So I finally got around to patching my ESXi server which was several months behind. I thought I would just be able to use the same command I used previously wrote about to update it. That proved to be unsuccessful and all I got for my efforts were errors about the profile name. After some searching I discovered a new command to accomplish what I wanted.

esxcli software vib install -d /vmfs/volumes/Datastore/update.zip

Datastore is the name of the datastore the update is on and update.zip will be the patch file name. The complete command would look like this:

esxcli software vib install -d /vmfs/volumes/Storage/Updates/ESXi510-201307001.zip

Installation Result
Message: The update completed successfully, but the system needs to be rebooted for the changes to be effective.
Reboot Required: true

   VIBs Installed: etc....
   VIBs Removed: etc....
   VIBs Skipped: etc....

After running the command you should get a message saying something similar to result above. It will usually be followed by a long list of all the individual packages. Reboot your host either through the vSphere client or by typing

reboot

and your host should be updated once it finishes rebooting.

 

RoboForm: A full featured password manager and more

Lets face it: We have more passwords than we can ever remember. Whether it’s personal or work, we usually have dozens if not hundreds of username/password sets to remember for various applications and sites. The solution for most people is to reuse their username and passwords across sites. While this may make them easier to remember it also makes it easier for  them to be compromised. The common recommendation is to use passwords composed of alphanumeric characters (0-9, a-z, A-Z) and symbols. While that may increase the security of your passwords the likelihood of remembering one instance of “a320#.?atx!” is small, let alone 30 for a dozen different systems. It’s much easier to remember the name of a pet or a relative/spouse. So how do you get around the need for more secure passwords while  actually being able to remember the passwords themselves or instituting expensive biometric systems?  One answer is to use a password manager. There are several popular ones available but I favor RoboForm after having used it for several years. Why use a password manager and why choose RoboForm over other solutions? Well, lets dig in below and see!
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