March 11th, 2010 
Simon Seagrave 
The vSphere Host Update Utility 4.0 is something of an overlooked utility for small business and lab environments wanting to patch or upgrade their ESX/ESXi hosts. In this basic ‘how to’ post I’m going to run through the steps in upgrading a VMware ESXi 4.0 host to ESXi 4.0 Update 1 using the utility.
The first thing I should mention is that the checking for updates and patching part of the utility is for ESXi and not ESX use, though the upgrading (eg: v3.5 –> v4.0) can be used by both versions. If you are wondering how you get a copy of the vSphere Host Update Utility, it can be installed as an option at the time of installing the vSphere client on your PC.
To start the utility navigate to the VMware folder and click on the ‘vSphere Host Update Utility 4.0’ menu item.
You’ll first be greeted with a message box asking it you want to ‘download the patches from the VMware patch repository’. Click ‘Yes’.
Press the ‘Scan for Patches’ button and enter the ESXi’ hosts logon credentials when prompted.
The vSphere Host Update Utility will now scan the ESXi host for available patches. As you can see below there are 13 available patches detected.
If you’re ready to patch the host first make sure that your ESXi host is in ‘Maintenance Mode’’ and then click ‘Patch Host’.
You’ll now be shown a separate window containing a list of the available patches along with a description of each. Take some time to read through each to ensure that you do in fact want to install them. Deselect any you don’t want to apply and then click ‘Install’.
The VMware vSphere Host Update Utility will now apply the selected patches to your ESXi host. Go and make a cup of tea as this can take at least a few minutes.
In this particular instance the ESXi host rebooted to complete the patching process (to ESXi 4.0 Update 1). When the host comes up again you will now see that it is running the latest version of ESXi.
Now what could be easier! 
Hope you found this quick ‘how to’ guide useful.
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My name is Simon Seagrave and I am a London (UK) based Senior Technology Consultant and vSpecialist working for EMC. 
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one question… in that process who is the one downloading the patches ? the machine running the Host Update Utility or the ESX host?
Hi Ariel,
When you first start the Host Update Utility it downloads any patches from the VMware Patch Repository to the PC/server running the utility. When you go to start the patching it at this point uploads the patches from the PC running the utility to the ESXi host.
Hope this helps.
Cheers,
Simon
Yes it helps, i was asking that because few weeks ago i was trying to update my ESXi and it fails, at the point the ESXi didn’t have internet connection and that was the firs thing i notice and stop doing the update.
I will try again and post it back! Thanks!!
Great article Simon, thanks.
I’m just trying to patch my ESXi 4 U1 host using the method you describe above, but it fails with a strange error every time:
“The patch operation has failed with this error: The patch metadata or binaries may be corrupted. This can be caused by following reasons: files are incorrectly signed, signed with incorrect keys, or local data corruption. Downloading the patches again from the depot server may solve this problem. Please check the log files of host agent, vpxa and esxupdate for more details”
Much online searching has turned up nothing useful – any ideas?
Thanks!
Simon, hello.
Funny thing from Vmware.. you can update esxi servers, but you can’t update esx servers. Great for upgrading servers, currently upgrading our 10 hosts and aprox. 200 servers .. real deal
But I managed also to establish Update Manager and it works like charm. Nigel, you should try it.
Just a quick follow up…
Bojan, thanks for the suggestion. Yes, Update Manager is great, but in my case perhaps a bit of an overkill for a single standalone host..?
Turned out I had some bad RAM in my host. Replacing it cured this and a number of other weird and wonderful (intermittent) error messages, crashes and VMs either blue screening or refusing to boot. Good old Memtest to the rescue!
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