That document is helpful. I saw a PDF yesterday that looked like this same sort of solution. It's very detailed but would still need to be modified for my needs because I'd need a bootable Linux CD that I could grab the .dd file then run dd command off the CD in order to burn it to the embedded flash in the IBM blade (since it's not a flash I can take out and plug into my desktop).

I could do that but that kind of hacking around isn't something I'm willing to do on blades I've got to quickly push out to production. Too risky, too untested, unsupported by VMware (surely) and possibly IBM plus I'm not in that critical of a need for Update 2 in the first place (failure upgrading to U2 is the reason I wanted this is the first place).

If VMware provides a procedure or ISO file for upgrading ESXi embedded versions (what I'm suggesting in this post that they do) then I'll test it out, no problem. Otherwise I can't risk it. I've burned myself in the past doing less dangerous stuff than running dd commands on an embedded flash device on a relatively new blade model. Perhaps I can just run the Recovery CD from IBM if it fails and be right back where I started, but I can't risk it if the rollback isn't that simple.

What can I say, I'm a whimp!