Are you upgrading from 4.0 to 4.1U1 ? Then read on or you will end up like me browsing trough the ZIP file and the XML files inside to find out the correct bulletin name. It’s not pleasant to do this when you just entered maintenance mode in a small time frame to stop production vm’s.
Procedure from the Upgrade guide:
Procedure
1 Download the following upgrade ZIP bundle from the VMware Web site to a location that is accessible
to the vSphere CLI machine.
upgrade-from-ESXi4.0-to-4.1.0-0.0.build#-release.zip
The upgrade ZIP bundle contains and esxupdate bulletin and an upgrade bulletin.
2 Power off any virtual machines that are running on the host and place the host into maintenance mode.
3 Install the esxupdate bulletin by running the following command on the vSphere CLI machine.
vihostupdate –server host name or IP address -i -b location of the ESXi upgrade ZIP bundle –
B ESXi410-GA-esxupdate
4 Install the upgrade bulletin by running the following command on the vSphere CLI machine.
vihostupdate –server host name or IP address -i -b location of the ESXi upgrade ZIP bundle -B ESXi410-GA
5 Verify that the bulletins are installed on the ESXi host by running the following command.
vihostupdate.pl –server host name or IP address –query
6 Reboot the host.
What they fail to mention is that the bulletin name in step 4 has changed. So in step 4 the command should now read:
vihostupdate –server host name or IP address -i -b location of the ESXi upgrade ZIP bundle -B ESXi40-TO-ESXi41UPDATE01
PS: After the upgrade I had some problems connecting to the management IP. I did a restart management but no effect. I then changed the mgmt IP and I could connect. However I had to update my client before I could login.