Upgrade ESXi 5.5 to ESXi 5.5 Update 1

VMware announced the update for vSphere 5.5 which is vSphere 5.5 update 1.  This update includes most of the vCloud Suite products, including VMware Virtual SAN (VSAN). It is time to upgrade your vSphere 5.5 to vSphere 5.5 update 1 to utilize the new features and also to fix the issues reported on the vSphere 5.5. It’s again the task for VMware admins to make their hands dirty with updating your vSphere 5.5. This post going to explain the procedure to upgrade the ESXi 5.5 host to ESXi 5.5 update 1.

This can be easily achieved using Update Manager but even though this post is going to explain the manual process to upgrade your ESXi host using esxcli command. Download ESXi 5.5 Update 1 from the VMware patch download page and download the ESXi 5.s update 1 zip file. Take a look at post Search and Download VMware Patches.

 Once ESXi 5.5 update 1 is downloaded, upload the update-from-esxi5.5-5.5_update01. zip file to your datastore of the ESXi host and verify the file is visible in the directory inside the datastore .Before upgrading to ESXi 5.5 update 1, verify the build version of our ESXi host. which isVMware ESXi 5.5.0 (VMKernel Release Build 1331820) 

You can verify the build version of ESXi 5.5 from the command line using the below command:

vmware -v

Execute the below command to install the ESXi 5.5 update 1 :

esxcli software vib install -d /datastore/directory/update-from-esxi5.5-5.5_update01. zip

Once ESXi 5.5 update 1 is installed on the ESXi host, You can see the message “The update completed successfully, but the system needs to be rebooted for the changes to be effective”.  Reboot the ESXi host. Once ESXi host is back after the reboot, verify the ESXi version after upgrade to ESXi 5.5 update 1.

Build version for the ESXi 5.5 update  1 is VMware ESXi 5.5.0 (VMkernel Release Build 1623387)

 That’s it. We are done with the upgrade to ESXi 5.5 to ESXi 5.5 update 1. I hope this is informative for you.