How to host your own simple ESXi update depot?

I recently upgraded my single ESXi host, which is used for my personal vSphere Homelab, to the latest patch release of ESXi 7.0 Update 3e using ESXCLI and connecting directly to VMware's online depot.

I still love how easy it is to update a single ESXi host using ESXCLI and using VMware's Patch Repo -

ESXI_VERSION=ESXi-7.0U3e-19898904-standard

"esxcli software profile update -d https://t.co/cs4yUyvnxQ -p ${ESXI_VERSION}"https://t.co/77Iu0K0hUG pic.twitter.com/nLhx5ztmNa

— William Lam (@lamw) July 7, 2022

This is the same method that I have been using since 2012 when I first wrote about this in a blog post using a pretty cool method of upgrading/patching a single ESXi hosts. If you are fortunate to have multiple ESXi hosts and a vCenter Server, you definitely should be using vSphere Lifecycle Manager (vLCM) provided by vCenter Server rather than the ESXCLI method, especially as there are no upgrade pre-checks built into in compared to vLCM.

Although my environment has a vCenter Server, I can not use vLCM because I only have a single ESXi host and ESXCLI method is really the only viable option. Customers may have a simliar setup, whether that is for a homelab, smaller environment or simply do not have a vCenter Server. Using the ESXCLI workflow, it certainly is the easiest if your ESXi host can reach VMware's online repo which is hosted at hostupdate.vmware.com, however this may not be possible for everyone, especially for remote locations where connectivity may be spotty or simply is not allowed to have outbound connectivity.

For such environments, you might be interested in hosting your own ESXi update repo and as always, I was curious on how one could setup something simliar without much effort and well, here we are with this blog post 😀

VMware does provide an official tool in building your ESXi depot using the VMware Update Manager Download Service (UMDS), which can be installed on a supported Linux distribution and I have even demonstrated how to do this using Docker Container. One thing that I found limiting with the UMDS tool is that it does not provide a means to limit the specific ESXi version and updates and forces you to download a ton more packages which may or may not be needed.

I was interested in exploring a more simpler way of building my own ESXi depot where I can selectively pick the ESXi versions that I would download from VMware download and/or patch website here and here.

Step 1 - You need access to a webserver (HTTP or HTTPS) to host the desired ESXi update and patch files. If you do not have one, you can easily spin one up using VMware's Photon OS or any OS distribution that you are comfortable with. In root of your webserver, create a new folder which will house all your ESXi files. In the example below, I will be using vmw but you can choose any other name, but just make a note of it as we will need to update the index file with the name you choose here.

Step 2 - Download the desired ESXi releases and/or patch updates in their offline bundle format (.zip) from here and here and then transfer them to your webserver.

Step 3 - In root of your webserver, create an index.xml file that contains the following and ensure that you update the patchUrl parameter with the desired folder name you had created in Step 1. This file simply points ESXCLI to the directory that contains index file for all available ESXi releases.

<vmwdpm:vendorList
    xmlns:vmwdpm="http://www.vmware.com/depotmanagement"
    xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance" xsi:schemaLocation="http://www.vmware.com/depotmanagement ../../depot-index-xml.xsd">
    <vendor>
        <name>vmware, inc.</name>
        <code>vmw</code>
        <indexfile>index.xml</indexfile>
        <patchUrl>vmw</patchUrl>
        <relativePath>vmw</relativePath>
        <content>
            <name>VMware ESX</name>
            <type>http://www.vmware.com/depotmanagement/esx</type>
        </content>
    </vendor>
</vmwdpm:vendorList>

Step 4 - Extract the individual ESXi offline bundle zip files into their own unique directory that should be then placed into patch directory you had created earlier in Step 1. In my example, I have downloaded ESXi 7.0 Update 3a, 3b, 3c, 3d and 3e which will map to the following folder structure esxi-7.0u3a, esxi-7.0u3b, esxi-7.0u3c, esxi-7.0u3d and esxi-7.0u3e

Here is the command to unzip an ESXi offline bundle into the desired folder name:

unzip VMware-ESXi-7.0U3e-19898904-depot.zip -d /etc/httpd/html/vmw/esxi-70u3e

Step 5 - Within the folder (vmw) that houses all the ESXi update files, you will need to create another index.xml file which points to the individual ESXi releases. You will need to specify the relative path to .zip file that is located within the extract ESXi offline bundle.

For example, the ESXi 7.0 Update 3e offline bundle contains the following 4 files:

We then need to add an XML entry that points to esxi-70u3e/vmw-ESXi-7.0.3-metadata.zip file. You will need to do this for each ESXi release that you wish to host and for earlier releases, the .zip file maybe named differently and you should inspect the contents before creating the XML entry.

Here is the complete index.xml for hosting all five ESXi 7.0 Update 3 releases:

<metaList>
    <metadata>
        <productId>embeddedEsx</productId>
        <version>7.0.3</version>
        <locale />
        <url>esxi-70u3a/vmw-ESXi-7.0.3-metadata.zip</url>
        <channelName>default</channelName>
    </metadata>
    <metadata>
        <productId>embeddedEsx</productId>
        <version>7.0.3</version>
        <locale />
        <url>esxi-70u3b/vmw-ESXi-7.0.3-metadata.zip</url>
        <channelName>default</channelName>
    </metadata>
    <metadata>
        <productId>embeddedEsx</productId>
        <version>7.0.3</version>
        <locale />
        <url>esxi-70u3c/vmw-ESXi-7.0.3-metadata.zip</url>
        <channelName>default</channelName>
    </metadata>
    <metadata>
        <productId>embeddedEsx</productId>
        <version>7.0.3</version>
        <locale />
        <url>esxi-70u3d/vmw-ESXi-7.0.3-metadata.zip</url>
        <channelName>default</channelName>
    </metadata>
    <metadata>
        <productId>embeddedEsx</productId>
        <version>7.0.3</version>
        <locale />
        <url>esxi-70u3e/vmw-ESXi-7.0.3-metadata.zip</url>
        <channelName>default</channelName>
    </metadata>
</metaList>

Here is what the final directory structure should look like if you followed my exact folder names:

Note: Make sure all files, directories(s) and their sub-directorie(s) have the correct permissions so they can be accessed over HTTP(s).

The final step is to verify that everything was setup and configured correctly by using an ESXi host (Nested ESXi Appliance is recommended for ease of testing and patching purposes) to probe our depot and pointing the initial index.xml located at the root of your webserver (e.g. http://patch.primp-industries.local/index.xml)

esxcli software sources profile list -d http://patch.primp-industries.local/index.xml

If everything was configured correctly, we should see the list of ESXi releases that we have added to our webserver that can now be used to patch and update your ESXi host(s)!