It was time to upgrade my macmini’s running vmware ESXi 5.5 to 6. Since I didn’t want to hazzel with ISO’s and do it from the comfort of my desk I chose to do it via SSH and esxcli.

Shut down all VMs on your ESXi host machine.

Connect via SSH and enter maintenance mode.

vim-cmd /hostsvc/maintenance_mode_enter

To be able to download the updates you need a firewall rule for httpClient.

esxcli network firewall ruleset set -e true -r httpClient

Next, you need to list the ESXi 6.x files available. It’s listed with Software, version, release number and build. In my case as of 2015-08 it’s ESXi-6.0.0-2494585-standard.

esxcli software sources profile list -d https://hostupdate.vmware.com/software/VUM/PRODUCTION/main/vmw-depot-index.xml | grep ESXi-6

Now you are ready to upgrade your system.

esxcli software profile update -d https://hostupdate.vmware.com/software/VUM/PRODUCTION/main/vmw-depot-index.xml -p ESXi-6.0.0-2494585-standard

Now you are ready to restart the machine and enjoy ESXi-6 and its features. Remember if you are upgrading a macmini you might need to reselect EFI Boot after restart.