Blog::Post.new

Over the past year, I dropped the ball on this blog. It’s been a busy time, but I’ll try over the next year to make a few more posts. So what has been going on? Here are a few of the items keeping me busy:

• Received the results on the VCAP-DCA; did not pass. The equipment I was using was also moved, so I did not get the opportunity to prepare and take it again.
• Made a couple of trips to Ireland and spent about a month in England.
• Moved back to Louisiana.
• Dabbled in PowerShell, PHP, Python, Scala, Ruby
• Changed managers about two or three times.
• Passed the VCP 5

So what’s in store in the coming year? Well hopefully a lot of cool projects. There are a few topics I want to blog about and hopefully post some useful tools. I’m looking to move everything I do to Ruby, though there may still be some internal PowerShell scripts for some items.

This is my short update. Hopefully everyone had a good year.

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Applying patches to ESXi 5 with the help of PowerCLI

So today, Chris Colitti posted a blog article about patching ESXi 5 without VUM. If you haven’t read it, I suggest you click this link and read his post.

After reading this post, I was surprised to find out that esxcli did not support pushing patch or extension files remotely. Prior to ESXi 5, you could use vihostupdate via the vCLI to install the patch or extension zip files to a host. With vSphere 5, vihostupdate has been deprecated. The esxcli command supports installing a patch or extension from a remote depot url (VUM for instance) or from a local file path on the server, as Chris pointed out. Another option would be to host the actual vib files on an http or ftp server and use the -v option with esxcli to point to the remote location of these files. However, this is not the point of this blog post. This blog post will talk about using PowerShell and PowerCLI to assist esxcli in installing patches remotely. I will not provide a whole script, but just some useful commands.

First, to make things easier, we’ll set a couple of variables.
$esxcli = "C:\Program Files\VMware\VMware vSphere CLI\bin\esxcli.exe" #location of esxcli
$server = "192.168.1.10" #server we want to patch
$patch = "PatchFile.zip" #patch file we want to apply
$patchLocation = "C:\" #local path to patch"
$datastore = "datastore1" #datastore where we want to store the patch
$remoteLocation = "/vmfs/volumes/" + $datastore + "/" + $patch #remote location of patch

Now, we want to mount a datastore to our workstation. First we need to connect to the ESXi host before doing anything.

Connect-VIServer $server
New-PSDrive -name "mounteddatastore" -Root \ -PSProvider VimDatastore -Datastore (Get-Datastore $datastore)

After we mount our datastore, we can then copy the patch to the datastore.

Copy-Datastoreitem $patchLocation + $patch -Destination mounteddatastore:

Once our file is copied, we can then execute esxcli to install our patch

& $esxcli --server $server software vib install -d $remoteLocation

This will execute esxcli on your workstation to install the patch we just uploaded to the datastore. Once the patch is installed, we can remove the patch and disconnect the datastore from the workstation.

del mounteddatastore:$patch
Remove-PSDrive -name "mounteddatastore" -PSProvider VimDatastore

So with this little bit of knowledge, you could write a PS script to copy the patch to a datastore (preferably shared across hosts), and then call esxcli to install the patch on the required hosts.

Update: A new blog post is up detailing using the Get-EsxCli cmdlet in PowerCLI. This can be located here.