VMware ESX, also exactly needed to be updated periodically, and doesn’t have an automatic method for it, but you can do it by some command on the shell much smarter and quicker.
First of all you have two choices for the updates, the one’s is to download the updates from the VMware support web site by considering the pre-requirement option, and install the updates by using VMware Infrastructure Update client, the second way is to download the updates into the ESX server, and install it without the use of “VIU”, on my purpose the second is more appropriate.
For downloading the files in any Linux environment you can use” wget” or “curl” but none of the is available in ESX , instead of those you can use ”lwp-download” ,take into the account that the substitute command is just support ftp and http protocols and by using full url .
#lwp-download http://download3.vmware.com/software/vi/ESX350-XYZ.zip
#unzip ESX350-XYZ.zip
An common problem in downloading files in ESX is the “connection refused” error that show the blocking of the outgoing traffic by ESX firewall, temporally for solving the problem issue the following command.
#esxcfg-firewall –allowOutGoing
For installing the updates in command line, you have a possibility to use “esxupdate” command in a similar manner.
#esxupdate –noreboot –force -r /any-path-that-contain-the-update/ESX350-XYZ.zip/ update
In the case of complying the requirement of the updates, the command must complete successfully.
Make sure that return the firewall to default setting after completing the update.
# esxcfg-firewall –blockOutGoing
