Before updating the new patches on the ESXi host, I was looking to find the patches which were already applied on the hosts and I used the command “esxcli software vib list “ but only got the VIBs and drivers info which is not very clear to understand about the version of the patches running on the hosts. After spending some time found an article which provides the good info about the VIBs and the ESXi Patches.I just shared the few points below and pls get in to the below link for more information ..
ESXi from VMware by default it is made up of multiple software packages ( currently 60 for ESXi 5.0 and 65 for ESXi5.1 ) called VIBs ( VMware Installation Bundles). It has one large VIB for the base system (ESX-BASE),One for the VMwae Tools (tools-light), and other remaining is mostly hardware device drivers. So when we applying the patches it will update one of these VIBs. Each single patch does only change one or multiple VIBs and we need to install the latest patch bundle to make the ESXi fully patched.
From the link https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/10Vzx4NLhx1XzhmS-hQuIO1wXa98_8EKN3bhXjFx2GgQ/edit?pli=1#gid=1609895093 we can find the VIBs that are updated in a patch bundle . By using the build number in the host we can find the corresponding VIBs from the spreadsheet .Also I found some useful command in the blog “esxcli software sources profile list “ to list the image profile on the patch bundle and “ esxcli software profile install/update “.Pls note it is recommended to use update to keep all installed packages that are not included in the image profile or higher version number.
Also have a look on below useful links
http://www.virten.net/vmware/vcenter-release-and-build-number-history/
Click to access VMware_vSphere_Release_and_Build_Number_History_2015-09-22.pdf
http://www.virten.net/vmware/vcenter-release-and-build-number-history/
Reference :
http://www.v-front.de/2012/11/are-esxi-5x-patches-cumulative.html
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