Intro
I’ve updated my Lab vCenters to 6.7 U3a so now its time to upgrade my hosts. Normally when I do an upgrade I’m doing full version upgrades so a patch upgrade process blog is in order.
My lab vCenters do not have access to the internet, as a result I cannot download the patches directly to the Update manager so this post is covering how to manually get and add the patches.
The Steps
The first step before patching hosts is to patch your vCenter as you always patch the VC before hosts otherwise if your hosts are a higher version than your VC then you won’t be able to manage the hosts.
The first step in a host patch process is obviously to acquire the patch to do so go to the following URL https://my.vmware.com/group/vmware/patch then login with your my.vmware account.
Change the search to ESXi and the version you currently have.
This will then show you the available patches then simply click Download.
Next login to the vCenter and browse to Update Manager
Go to the ‘Updates’ tab and click ‘UPLOAD FROM FILE’
If your vCenter has internet access you can just click Download now but since my lab is isolated and this is a manual process guide we need to manually upload the file 😉
The patches will get imported.
And they are now shown in the ADD/REMOVE BASELINES section on the same page.
As these are patches they are automatically added to the patch baseline.
Next we need to remediate our hosts. This can be done on a host by host level or via the cluster.
Select the host or cluster and go to Updates
If not already added you’ll need to attach the baseline. Click ‘ATTACH’ and then ‘Attach Baseline or Baseline Group’
Attach the Baseline/s
Before running the patch its good practise to check the patch compliance, so click on ‘Check Compliance’
The system will scan the host/s for required patches and flag anything that is ‘Non-compliant’ meaning it needs to be applied.
Next step Click on ‘REMEDIATE’
Select all the hosts or as many as you want to patch and click ‘REMEDIATE’, the system will not do all of then at once so don’t worry about it downing hosts it will always stay keep the cluster HA acceptable
The patching will start, hosts will go into Maintenance mode during the installation
Once complete the system scans for compliance again and will show a status of compliant
By selecting a host and going to Updates you can now see the updated build number.
This can also be viewed from the host Summary screen.
