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pvestuto
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Thanks for your input.   It sounds like I can start by upgrading just the Upgrade 2 patch and I'll be pretty current.

The steps to do so are a little ambiguous to me so I'd let to get some detail.

My environment consists of two ESXi systems managed by vCenter.  Both nodes are ESXi 4.1 (no updates).  My network is based on Windows and the vCenter node is actually a VM running on one of the ESXi hosts, per recommendations.

I've read the ESX 4.1 Patch Management Guide, http://www.vmware.com/pdf/vsphere4/r41/vsp_41_esxupdate.pdf, and seveal forum articles and documentation, it appears there are several tools available to do the update

  • VCLI - I've used this in the past with the vihostupdate command, before our nodes were joined with vCenter.  However, it appears the vihostupdate command cannot be used for nodes controlled by vCenter.  The documentation says to use esxupdate.  However, that does not appear to be a valid command for any of the found namespaces in the vcli syntax.

  • vCenter Update Manager - through all of my readings, I thought I saw an article that said I could not use Update manager to put on update 2 since update 2 was needed for applying patches.  (Maybe that was for a cluster environment  - not sure.  I could not find that article again.)  This seems to be the easiest option if I can use it.

  • SSH - I have installed a product called PUTTY which gets me to the command prompt of the server.  There the esxupdate command works.  I haven't found any recommended SSH interfaces to get to the command prompt.  I would have thought the vcli application would have done this for me.

So, I have these main questions:

1) What is a recommended way to get the patch onto each host?  I saw one mention of setting up a depot separate from the ESXi hosts.  Other articles mention to FTP the file to the host.   When I used the CLI, I was able to specify a reference to a file on my Windows computer to the vihostupdate command.  I see the stage command of the esxupdate tool.  I am not sure if that has to be an official depot, or if it can be a URL to a Windows shared folder.

2) Which tool should I use to perform the update?  We are planning on adding a third node towards the end of this year and putting ESXi 5.0 on it, then upgrading the other two nodes to ESX 5.  So, with that in mind, I'm trying to do some leg work now that will help for that upgrade.

It seems vCenter Update Manager would be the way to go.  Since our vCenter VM is acutally running on one of the VMs, I realize I would have to migrate it off of the node we are trying to upgrade.

VMWare has been working great for us.  We have been lax in upgrading it the past couple years so there's a learning curve to learn the tools.  I appreciate any guidance or references you can add to this.

- Paul -

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