How To: Upgrade VMware vSphere ESXi 6.5 to 6.7 via CLI

There are plenty of features to get excited about in the newly released vSphere 6.7, so without further ado, let’s get busy!

Step 1 – Install Media

We’ll need to download the VMware-ESXi-6.7.0-8169922-depot.zip  from VMware ESXi 6.7 page and upload it to datastore.

Step 2 – Upgrading

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

[root@esxi02:~] vmware -vl
VMware ESXi 6.5.0 build-7967591
VMware ESXi 6.5.0 Update 1

2.2 Next we need to find the profile name of 6.7, for this we execute:

esxcli software sources profile list -d  /vmfs/volumes/58b85632-ee7f225a-c83d-e4115bf1a352/VMware-ESXi-6.7.0-8169922-depot.zip

2.3 Which will provide us with the following results:

Name                         Vendor        Acceptance Level
---------------------------  ------------  ----------------
ESXi-6.7.0-8169922-standard  VMware, Inc.  PartnerSupported
ESXi-6.7.0-8169922-no-tools  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/58b85632-ee7f225a-c83d-e4115bf1a352/VMware-ESXi-6.7.0-8169922-depot.zip -p ESXi-6.7.0-8169922-standard

Step 3 – Confirmation

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

[root@esxi02:~] vmware -vl
VMware ESXi 6.7.0 build-8169922
VMware ESXi 6.7.0 GA