How to update VMware ESXi 6.7 to 6.7 Update 1

To go along with the newly released VMware vCenter 6.7 Update 1 release, comes VMware ESXi 6.7 Update 1 as well.

As you might expect with an Update 1 release there are a number of patches, fixes and new additions with ESXi 6.7 U1. If you haven’t already seen, check out the release notes here.

Below are two ways to easily upgrade your ESXi 6.0-6.7 hosts to ESXi 6.7 U1 using the command line or by using VMware Update Manager.
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VMware Update Manager U3e upgrade failing? Un-install it!

VMware Update Manager U3e error

I was recently upgrading a VMware environment from vCenter Server Update 3b to Update 3e and during the scheduled change I had also planned on upgrading VMware Update Manager to Update 3e and ran into the following error:

VMware Workstation unrecoverable error: (vthread-3)
GetProcAddress: Failed to resolve ENGINE)load_aesni: 127
You can request support.

Looking for a possible solution at the VMware Knowledge Base came back with no results and to error message wasn’t overly useful either with “VMware Workstation unrecoverable error: (vthread-3)” as Workstation wasn’t installed on this server.

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How to install VMware vSphere Update Manager 5.5

If you don’t already know, VMware Update Manager (aka, VUM) is a tool which allows you to easily automate patching and upgrading VMware hosts as well as virtual machine hardware and VMware tools. It’s a wonderful tool and makes upgrading and patching so much easier and allows you to quickly see how compliant/up-to-date your environment is with the built in pie graph.

Recently we had some pretty serious array issues which corrupted the VUM database taking Update Manager down. Since we was going to have to rebuild Update Manager I opted to move from Windows Server 2008 to Windows Server 2012, in the steps below I’ll document step by step how to install VMware Update Manager 5.5 on Server 2012 and a separate database.

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Upgrade ESXi host to ESXi 5.5 using VMware Update Manager 5.5

A while back I wrote about how to upgrade to ESXi 5.5 via command line which works great when you only have a few hosts as each host has to download the ISO from the web each time. This time I’ll show you step by step how to upgrade your ESXi 5.1 host to ESXi 5.5 using VMware Update Manager 5.5 (aka VUM).

For this post I’m going to assume you have already upgraded your vCenter and VUM to versions 5.5 as well as the VUM plugin installed. So lets begin!

Upgrade ESXi host to 5.5 using VMware Update Manager (VUM)

  1. Open the vSphere client and click on Update Manager
    VMware Update Manager icon

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