Updating to ESXi 5.1 Update 1 with the Offline Bundle

Update 1 for ESXi 5.1 has been out for a few weeks now and the release notes for vSphere ESXi 5.1 Update 1 can be found here. I had a few minutes of downtime so I decided to go ahead and update the ESXi host running my home lab. Not for any specific reason other than I had some time and wanted to get to the latest version.

I downloaded the offline bundle from My VMware.

Using the Datastore Browser I uploaded the offline bundle to a datastore that is accessible by the host I am upgrading.

To list out the image profiles that are contained in the offline bundle using esxcli.

esxcli software sources profile list -d /vmfs/volumes/datastore1/update-from-esxi5.1-5.1_update01.zip

Now apply the image profile update ESXi-5.1.0-20130402001-standard from the offline bundle with esxcli.

esxcli software profile update -d /vmfs/volumes/datastore1/update-from-esxi5.1-5.1_update01.zip -p ESXi-5.1.0-20130402001-standard

Once the update completes a host reboot is required.

After I rebooted the host the build number changed to 1065491 which corresponds to ESXi 5.1 Update 1.

Now to update VMware Tools on all my lab VMs. Not a big deal though since the tools update does not require a reboot! Nice!

Here is a great post on performing the update by downloading the bundle from the VMware update repository directly to the host – http://vninja.net/vmware-2/quick-dirty-esxi-5-1u1-upgrade/ – great write up.

Good to know the update can be applied a number of different ways; using VUM if your host is managed by vCenter, using the offline bundle, or by connecting directly to update repository from the host.