How To: Upgrade VMware vSphere ESXi 6.0 to 6.5 via CLI

Should you want to upgrade from VMware ESXi 6.0 to 6.5 remotely via CLI you can do in a few simple steps outlined below.

Step 1 – Install Media

We’ll need to download the VMware-ESXi-6.5.0-4564106-depot.zip from VMware ESXi 6.5 page:

Step 2 – Upgrading

2.1 Let’s confirm our ESXi version by SSH into the host:

[root@esxi02:~] vmware -vl
VMware ESXi 6.0.0 build-3620759
VMware ESXi 6.0.0 Update 2

2.2 Next we need to find the profile name of 6.5, for this we execute:

esxcli software sources profile list -d /vmfs/volumes/LabESXi02-DS01/VMware-ESXi-6.5.0-4564106-depot.zip

2.3 Which will provide us with the following results:

Name Vendor Acceptance Level
--------------------------- ------------ ----------------
ESXi-6.5.0-4564106-no-tools VMware, Inc. PartnerSupported
ESXi-6.5.0-4564106-standard VMware, Inc. PartnerSupported

2.4 Now that we have our profile names we’ll be updating our vSphere environment:

esxcli software profile update -d /vmfs/volumes/LabESXi02-DS01/VMware-ESXi-6.5.0-4564106-depot.zip -p ESXi-6.5.0-4564106-standard

Step 3 – Confirmation

SSH back into the host and re-execute vmware -vl:

[root@esxi02:~] vmware -vl
VMware ESXi 6.5.0 build-4564106
VMware ESXi 6.5.0 GA