Upgrade VMware ESXi 5.5 U1 using command line

March 14, 2014April 10, 2015 VMware

In case you missed it somehow, VMware released ESXi 5.5 Update 1 this week. In the last update I also used the command line to upgrade my Intel NUC hosts, which worked flawlessly. This time I’ve updated via command line as well and this is how.

vMotion any machines currently on the host, then place the host into Maintenance Mode.
On the host you’re about to upgrade, go to the Configuration tab > Security Profile and Enable SSH under Services.
Open PuTTY (or other SSH client) and SSH into your host.
Type the following command to open the firewall for outgoing HTTP requests.
```
esxcli network firewall ruleset set -e true -r httpClient
```

Now type the following command to download and upgrade to ESXi 5.5U1

esxcli software profile update -d https://hostupdate.vmware.com/software/VUM/PRODUCTION/main/vmw-depot-index.xml -p ESXi-5.5.0-20140302001-standard

Once that completes reboot your host by typing:
```
reboot
```

After it’s rebooted PuTTy back into the host and disable the HTTP firewall rule by typing:
```
esxcli network firewall ruleset set -e false -r httpClient
```
Also, don’t forget to disable SSH when you’re done for security purposes!

This is essentially the same steps taken in the last upgrade, except this time the firewall changes was done via command line too. Personally I would make the firewall change in the GUI as well as it’s just as easy to enable the firewall rule while I’m already there enabling SSH.

My VMware ESXi Home Lab Upgrade

February 1, 2019February 7, 2019 Home Lab

39 Comments

Although the focus in my career right now is certainly more cloud focused in Amazon Web Services and Azure, I still use my home lab a lot.

For the last 5+ years my home lab had consisted of using 3x Intel NUC’s (i5 DC53427HYE), a Synology NAS for shared storage and an HP ProCurve switch. This setup served me well for most of those years. It has allowed me to get many of the certifications I have, progress in my career and have fun as well.

At the start of this year I decided it was time to give the home lab an overhaul. At first I looked at the newest generation of Intel NUC’s but really wasn’t looking forward to dropping over $1,300 on just partial compute (I’d still need to be RAM for each of the 3 NUC’s). I also wanted something that just worked, no more fooling around with network adapter drivers or doing this tweak or that tweak.

I also no longer needed to be concerned about something that had a tiny footprint. I also questioned if I really needed multiple physical ESXi hosts. My home lab isn’t running anything mission critical and if I really wanted I could always build additional nested VMware ESXi hosts on one powerful machine if I needed.

So in the end, the below is what I settled on. Replacing all of my compute, most of my networking and adding more storage!

Shrink a thin provisioned VMDK disk

November 7, 2013November 3, 2013 VMware

8 Comments

When maintaining a Horizon View environment I like to keep my parent images as small as possible and over time a thin provision disk can start to grow on you if you don’t watch it – be it from downloading installers, updates, or even running disk defrag. While there isn’t a simple, one click button in the View Administrator Console there is a fairly easy manual method using vmfkstools.

Before we can use “vmkfstools” to shrink the VMDK file we must zero out any unused space on the thin provisioned disk. A simple way of doing this is by using a free utility called SDelete from Sysinternals.

VMware Workstation 11.1.2 released, bug fixes and security patches

June 18, 2015June 18, 2015 VMware

0 Comments

vmware workstation 11.1.2

VMware is just released a new VMware Workstation upgrade moving Workstation to version 11.1.2. The Workstation 11.1.2 update fixes a number of user reported issues, security patches, and further improves performance.

Increase incremental backup speed by enabling CBT

November 26, 2013November 4, 2014 VMware

2 Comments

In a recent VMware environment I was working in, we noticed that our incremental backups was taking a long time (like up to 7-8 hours) to complete. After digging around it was found that VMware actually has a feature built-in since version 4 called Change Block Tracking (CBT). CBT will track any blocks that were changed since the last backup and tag them and stores the information in a -CTK file. The obvious benefit is that now the third party software only backs up the changed block and not the entire VM each time, reducing the amount of data being backed thus speeding up backups and even lowers the CPU utilization on the VM host.

CBT is disabled by default though there are some backup tools that will enable it automatically or you can enable it manually which can easily be done following these steps:

Set default printer for View floating desktop and Persona Management

December 11, 2013 VMware

5 Comments

Sometime ago I asked a question over at the VMware forum about how to set default network printers on a VMware View 5.0 floating pool that used Persona Management as Persona Management wasn’t keeping this user setting on it’s own. The printers would be added to the VM just not remember the default printer setting. I’ll admit I forgot to update the thread, but a work around was devised which I’ll share below.

How to install VMware vSphere Update Manager 5.5

June 4, 2014August 24, 2018 VMware

2 Comments

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.