Upgrading Datrium CN2000 (Dell R630) to vSphere 6.5U1
Step-by-Step Guide:
I have been busy in the updating things to the latest versions of vSphere 6.5 Update 1 on all the hosts in my lab and as well as on the VCSA. The VCSA makes it very easy to update with internet access. Just navigate your browser to https://vcsa.domain.local:5480 and login with Administrator rights.
Choose update from the left column and then check. VCSA will automatically connect to the online repository and update with a reboot at the end. To reboot you’ll have to head back to the Summary page and choose reboot. You should make sure you have a solid backup of the VCSA before updating. VCSA includes a built-in backup capability or you can use another tool / product to achieve this.
Update vSphere to 6.5 Update 1
You’ll first want to grab the Service Tag of your Dell server, you can get this information from iDRAC or directly from the vSphere Web Client. You’ll use this on the Dell website to make sure you’re grabbing the best ESXi image that is supported for your hardware platform.
Head to Dell.com Drivers and Downloads section with your Service Tag handy, Change the Operating System to VMware ESXi 6.5 and scroll down…Click the View full driver details and download the .ZIP file to update an inplace version of vSphere. If you’re building hosts from scratch you’ll need the ISO image. So for this example we’ll need the .zip file
With the correct ISO image of vSphere 6.5 Update in our heads we’ll head over to a computer with an SCP tool. You can use WinSCP or another SCP utility that’s available for download off of the internet. Place the ISO image in the /var/core directory, this location will have ample space available to store the image file.
SSH to the ESXi host that is being upgraded and determine the profile to use for the update:
Command: esxcli software sources profile list -d /var/core/<image file name>
Note the Profile Name – We’ll need that for the update command. In my case it’s DellEMC-ESXi-6.5U1-7388607-A07
To start the upgrade on the ESXi host that is being upgraded:
Command: esxcli software profile update -d /var/core/<image file name> -p <profile name>
After a host reboot, we now have a fully updated Datrium DVX CN2000 Compute Node! The entire process takes less than just a few minutes.
