How to upgrade ESXi 4.0 to ESXi 4.1

I have done this a couple of times for my customers so I thought to document it for you.

In this senario I have 1 ESX1 4.0 host who I want to upgrade to ESX1 4.1. For this task I’m going to use the vihostupdate utility on the VMware Management Assistant (vMA).

First thing to do is to download the upgrade package (a zip file) form vmware.com. I guess you can find the package. Upload the file (upgrade-from-ESXi4.0-to-4.1.0-0.0.260247-release.zip) to the vMA. Because I’m using my OpenSuse desktop I can use the scp command:

scp upgrade-from-ESXi4.0-to-4.1.0-0.0.260247-release.zip vi-admin@10.1.0.2:~

If you don’t have Linux on your desktop you can use a tool like WinSCP to do the trick.

Notice that you have to use the user vi-admin because of security policies you cannot use root. When the file is uploaded login through ssh on the vMA (for Windows users you can use putty).

Before we can upgrade the ESX1 4.0 host we have to put the host in maintenance mode. I assume you all know how to do this. When the ESXi host is in maintenance mode, the first step we have to take is to upgrade esxupdate utility on the ESXi host.

vihostupdate –server [ip-adress] -i -b [path to upgrade zip file] -B ESXi410-GA-esxupdate

Note: The command is case sensitive!

Now we can upgrade the host.

vihostupdate –server [ip-adress] -i -b [path to upgrade zip file] -B ESXi410-GA

When the host is upgrade you can check the upgrade by entering the command:

vihostupdate –server [ip-adress] –query

If al is fine reboot the host and take it out of maintenance mode.