esx-autopatch.pl

esx-autopatch.pl

Manage your ESX v3.x patching process with esx-autopatch.pl. esx-autopatch.pl is a perl script that is designed to take the burden out of installing ESX 3.x patches until VMware can come up with a palpable solution to the problem. As time of writing there are no less than 25 seperate patches weighing in at a whopping 702M. Each patch has to be installed in correct order and can take a considerable amount of time to install. In fact, even a fully scripted installation takes nearly an hour. esx-autopatch.pl allows you to place all of your updates on either an ftp server, or a web server and bring down only the updates that are not yet installed on your system. Each update is checked to verify that it has the correct md5sum, and then installed in the correct order.

What you need:

1. An ESX v3.x host that needs to be patched.
2. A list of all the updates that you want to install on your system. Comprehensive lists for all patches are available for ESX 3.0.0, ESX 3.0.1, ESX 3.0.2 and ESX 3.5.0 ( 3.0.0 list , 3.0.1 list, 3.0.2 list , 3.5.0 list)
3. Either an http or ftp server to host the updates
4. A few minutes to configure the script.

First, download patches and patchlist.txt:

VMware makes all patches available here:http://www.vmware.com/download/vi/vi3_patches.html, download all applicable patches. Also, download patchlist.txt for either 3.0.0, 3.0.1, 3.0.2 or 3.5.0 .

There are also versions of the patchlist.txt that exclude any updates that are later superceded by newer updates, you can find those lists here (3.0.1 , 3.0.2 and 3.5.0).

Upload all the updates

Take all of the updates that you have downloaded, and the patchlist.txt and store them on the ftp server or http server in a directory that matches the version of the esx host that you want to patch, 3.0.0, 3.0.1, 3.0.2 and 3.5.0 are the available releases at the time of writing.

Configure the script

Read the header in the script and then configure your options accordingly.

Run the script

Make the script executable

#> chmod +x esx-autopatch.pl

Run the script

#> ./esx-autopatch.pl --http --url=http://domain.com/esxupdates --open-firewall --reboot

That's it!

Remember to test this process out on a development server. It has worked well for me and saved me lots of time, hopefully it will do the same for you. If you have any comments or feedback feel free to drop me an email at dominic@vmprofessional.com.