How do I know if the patch has already been installed on ESXi 5.0?

I describe the installation of patches ESXi on a group of servers (quarterly) who have not access to Internet, Update Manager is not an option.  I would like to be able to identify if a particular patch has already been installed so that I can jump through a script.

On ESX 3.5, you might look to see if it was in etc/vmware/patchdb/patch_name.xml, but I can't find something similar in ESXi 5.0.

Vib esxcli software controls do not seem to accept/meet with the zip file names I can say.  They seem to dig deeper into zip files that I want to go.

The closest I can find is 'grep - c patchname /var/log/esxupdate.log' for a given parcel (i.e. ESXi-500-201207001) and if there are in the file then it has probably been installed.  In addition, there is no clean text that I can pick up on as "Patch ESXi-500-xxxxxxxxx sucessfully installed" that slows me down. This approach has problems if the script is interrupted in the middle of the installation of a patch. When it is run again, it think the patch as it has already been installed and we could actually lose a patch.

If there is no way for this identify programmatically, I always install each patch in my quarterly updates (until the patch becomes obsolete).  I can't depend on my user to always run these quarterly updates, so I have to be able to catch up its system, if he missed a quarter.

Appreciate any suggerstions

There is no need to install the patches separately one after the other if you use a profile of the host to update your hosts.

Basically, a host profile is a set of files VIB forming a certain level of patch of ESXi.

1. download the bundle off line ESXi500-201209001 (or what ever is the most recent) from the portal to download patch (a direct link is https://hostupdate.vmware.com/software/VUM/OFFLINE/release-360-20120918-947362/ESXi500-201209001.zip)

2. download the zip file in a shared data store

3. update your hosts with the command

esxcli software profile update /path/to/ESXi500-201209001.zip d Pei ESXi 5.0.0 - 20120904001-standard

(change/path/to the directory of the correct data store)

-Andreas

Tags: VMware

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