VMware ESXi hypervisor

About

ESXi is an enterprise level virtualization product also known as a bare metal hypervisor. ESXI installs directly on the hardware and does not require a host OS as VMware Workstation and VMWare Fusion do. ESXI servers are managed from the vSphere client which can be downloaded from the ESXI host at http://IP-of-the-ESXi-server

ESXI is free but requires registration with VMWare. With version 5 of ESXi comes support for Mac OS VMs. ESXi needs to run on Apple hardware to accomplish this.

Patching ESXI

ESXI Versions 4 and 4.1 included a host patch utility with a GUI. As of ESXI version 5 and 5.1, you must use the command line for free ESXI instances.

Instructions for patching via the command line can be found here: http://www.itadmintools.com/2012/02/howto-patch-vmware-vsphere-esxi-50-free.html and here: http://vninja.net/vmware-2/quick-dirty-esxi-5-1u1-upgrade/

Official VMWare documentation here: http://kb.vmware.com/selfservice/microsites/search.do?language=en_US&cmd=displayKC&externalId=2008939

Instructions for upgrading to version 5.5.0 (released Sept. 22nd 2013) using command line are below. (with version 5.5 comes the support for Netboot for OS X)

  $ sudo ssh IP_of_the_ESXi-host
~ # esxcli network firewall ruleset set -e true -r httpClient
~ # esxcli software sources profile list -d https://hostupdate.vmware.com/software/VUM/PRODUCTION/main/vmw-depot-index.xml
~ # esxcli software profile update -d https://hostupdate.vmware.com/software/VUM/PRODUCTION/main/vmw-depot-index.xml -p ESXi-5.5.0-1331820-standard

Update Result Message: The update completed successfully, but the system needs to be rebooted

for the changes to be effective.
Reboot Required:true

~# reboot

To check the progress, run the following cmd:

~ # tail -f /var/log/esxupdate.log