how to install drivers on ESXi 5

My prefered method for updating drivers on vmware ESX is to use update manager.

  1. Download the driver
  2. Extract the zip file
  3. upload the offline bundle through update manager
  4. attach it to a baseline
  5. scan
  6. enter maintenance mode
  7. remediate
  8. reboot

Easy as pie. You can even add the Dell repository to install and update the OMSA ESX client (check out my past post on how to do this)

updatemanagerBut this week for some reason update manager wouldn’t update a NIC driver for me on our Qlogic 8300 CNA cards, so I had to do it through the command line. its any easy process you just have to do it one machine at a time.

  1. Download drivers
  2. extract zip
  3. upload offline bundle to ESX (you can use winscp or the datastore browse in the VI client)
  4. enter maintenance mode
  5. ssh into ESX server and run –>esxcli software vib install -d /vmfs/volumes/datastore/offline-bundle.zip?–no-sig-check (change the path to the zip to the location you uploaded it to)
  6. reboot

 

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