Installing Patches on your ESX Server
VMWare releases patches for ESX quite often, and it can get tiring installing them all the time one by one. So I wrote a wiki for the methods I use, which cut down the time of installation (for me having 20+ production hosts) quite a-bit.
Here is the link:
http://www.benkevan.com/wiki/index.php/Installing_Patches_on_ESX_Server
Here’s a little excerpt from it:
Install Released Patches
To install patches released by VMWare download them and transfer them to your esx server
scp -r patchrootdir user@server:/tmp/patches
ssh into your ESX server with your local ESX server account.
ssh servername
One you are on the host change user to root
su -
If you copied over the zip files change directory to the patches location and unzip all the patches
cd /tmp/patches
for i in *.zip; do unzip $i; done; rm *.zip
Now install the patches
for j in ESX*; do cd $j; esxupdate –noreboot update; cd ..; done
Note: If there are dependancies and not all of them are install just run the command above twice.




For the last bit you should just download and extract the contents.zip file from the same page as the patches (at the top). esxupdate will then automatically determine which patches need to be applied and in which order.
Hi Steve,
That will only work if it’s a “Bundle Update” ie Update 2 etc.
I’ll update the posting to reflect that.
I play on also updating the wiki to show what tools can be used (pscp / fastscp etc).
Thanks for the reply.. I’ll update.
Thanks for helping us out!