Upgrade ESXi 6.7 to ESXi 7.0 using esxcli

August 14, 2020

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Upgrade

vSphere 7.0 was announced by VMware quite a while ago vSphere 7.0 announcement but only recently I had some time to upgrade my Home Lab to vSphere 7.0.

In this post I will show you the procedure to upgrade ESXi to vSphere 7.0 using esxcli commands.

There are several steps to do it but we need to sort out the prerequisites first.

Prerequisites

There is pretty much only one prerequisite - download offline bundle which will be used to upgrade running ESXi.

Enable SSH on your ESXi host. If you don’t know how to do it you can follow VMware KB Using ESXi Shell in ESXi 5.x, 6.x and 7.x (2004746)
Upload ESXi upgrade offline bundle via your favorite SCP client. As an alternative you can upload via browser. To do it follow VMware documentation “Upload Files or Folders to Datastores”
Once the file is uploaded we need to login to ESXi host via SSH.
While being logged via SSH we need to execute following command to actually upgrade the ESXi.

esxcli software profile update -p ESXi-7.0.0-15843807-standard -d /vmfs/volumes/datastore1/VMware-ESXi-7.0.0-15843807-depot.zip

Once the upgrade is done you will find information that reboot is required.
After the reboot ESXi is ready to use with the upgraded version.

With over 16 years in the IT industry, I am a seasoned and innovative IT professional with a track record of success. Drawing from my extensive work experience in large and complex corporate environments, I bring knowledge to help customers and businesses achieve their goals with precision, professionalism, and cost-effectiveness. leading vendor certifications have recognized my expertise from AWS, Alibaba Cloud, Google Cloud, VMware, and Microsoft. I am dedicated to contributing to the IT community, as evidenced by my VMware vExpert awards from 2014-2023, including vExpert Pro 2018-2023, vExpert Cloud Provider 2022, and VMware vExpert NSX 2017 Award.