This morning I needed to install the USB Network Native Driver Fling for ESXi and realized that offline bundles can not be installer over a remote URL. I figure I would download it directly to my ESXi host using wget. As soon as I hit the enter key to send the command I quickly remember that this will fail as the version of wget in the ESXi Shell does not support HTTPs. To my surprise, it actually worked! 😍

[root@nuc:~] wget https://download3.vmware.com/software/vmw-tools/USBNND/ESXi700-VMKUSB-NIC-FLING-34491022-component-15873236.zip
Connecting to download3.vmware.com (184.29.106.37:443)
ESXi700-VMKUSB-NIC-F 100% |**************************************************************************************************************************************************************************| 341k 0:00:00 ETA

This looks to be an enhancement in ESXI 7.0 and you no longer will get the "bad address" error when specifying an HTTPs URL as shown in the example below when running against the latest ESXi 6.7 Update 3 release.

[root@esxi67:~] wget https://download3.vmware.com/software/vmw-tools/USBNND/ESXi700-VMKUSB-NIC-FLING-34491022-component-15873236.zip
wget: bad address 'download3.vmware.com'

Thank you to the Engineer who fixed this, this was a very pleasant and welcome surprise that I know will also be helpful to folks who automate using ESXi Scripted Installations.