Upgrading VMWare ESXi from version 4.0.0 to version 4.1.0 via vSphere Command-Line Interface
Installing vSphere Command-Line Interface (vCLI)
You can get the vCLI from VMware's website. In our this page, we will provide the upgrade method with vCLI on Linux (i386). The procedure on Linux (x86_64) is very similar to the method in this page.
First, please extract the downloaded tarball and then go into the extracted directory.
$ tar -zxvf VMware-vSphere-CLI-4.1.0-254719.i386.tar.gz $ cd vmware-vsphere-cli-distrib
You can then install vCLI. Before execute the install command, please be priviledged user (i.e., root).
$ su # ./vmware-install.pl
If you have required but uninstalled perl packages, you would get such a following message after you accept the license agreement.
No packages found matching *ssl-dev*. libssl-dev 0.9.7 is required for encrypted connections. Please install libssl-dev version 0.9.7 or greater. No packages found matching libxml-libxml-perl.
If you get these kinds of messages, pleae install them. If you don't need to install additional packages, it asks you in which directory you wnat to install the execute files as follows. So, please specify the install directory there.
In which directory do you want to install the executable files? [/usr/bin]
You can get the following message after it has been successfully installed.
The installation of vSphere CLI 4.1.0 build-254719 for Linux completed successfully. You can decide to remove this software from your system at any time by invoking the following command: "/usr/bin/vmware-uninstall-vSphere-CLI.pl". This installer has successfully installed both vSphere CLI and the vSphere SDK for Perl. The following Perl modules were found on the system but may be too old to work with vSphere CLI: HTML::Parser 3.60 or newer URI 1.37 or newer Enjoy, --the VMware team
Getting the upgrade package
Please download the upgrade package from VMware's website. In this page, we used the package "ESXi 4.1 (upgrade ZIP from ESXi 4.0)": upgrade-from-ESXi4.0-to-4.1.0-0.0.260247-release.zip.
Upgrading your VMware ESXi
Finally, you can install the upgrade package to your VMware ESXi. Before installing it, please let your VMware ESXi host enter into maintenance mode. Then, you can upgrade it by executing the following command.
$ vihostupdate --server your.vmware.hostname.example.com -i -b <path-to-your-upgrade-package/upgrade-from-ESXi4.0-to-4.1.0-0.0.260247-release.zip> -B ESXi410-GA Enter username: <administrator's account (maybe root)> Enter password: <administrator's password> Please wait patch installation is in progress ... The update completed successfully, but the system needs to be rebooted for the changes to be effective.
Why do we have to use vCLI instead of vSphere Client?
Upgrade error via vSphere Client
The vSphere Client is very useful and it has an intuitive interface to manage our virtual machines. However, when we try to upgrade VMware ESXi from version 4.0.0 to version 4.1.0 via vSphere Client 4.1.0, an error with the message "Failed to read the upgrade package metadata.xml" has occurred. So, we use vCLI instead of vSphere Client for the upgrade procedure.