Today, I had wont to upgrade my ESX 5.5 installation to ESX 5.5 U1b. No particular reason, I just thought an upgrade was a bit overdue – plus I’m about to embark on a new project and I thought it was perhaps safest to be on the latest and greatest before going any further. The first installation had been made with a custom HP ISO, so it made sense to go for the same option. As you might recall from a post earlier this year, I experienced PSOD when using the generic vanilla ESX 5.5 media.
I download the HP edition of the U1b code, and proceed to do a DVD still upgrade. I only have 3 hosts so I thought I’d go down the simple route. However, my first attempt didn’t go as smoothly as I hoped.
Fortunately, I wasn’t on my own – folks on the community forums had been caught out by this before. The error appears during the checking devices phase after selecting the storage that contains the installation (local disk, SAN disk or USB/SD disk)…
https://communities.vmware.com/thread/482105
It turns out the work around is to find the offending Broadcom VIB on HP website, and then INSTALL it as an individual VIB, and then try the upgrade. This effectively overwrites the old driver – and when the upgrade takes place – its doesn’t get touched because its the same version.
To grab the driver I went over to – http://vibsdepot.hp.com/hpq/jun2014/esxi-550-devicedrivers/ and downloaded the BCM-NetXtremeII-4.0-1796156.zip. I extracted this zip using the Mac’s native utilities to find the offline ZIP bundle.
I transferred this over to my “software” datastore which is available to every node in the cluster, and then SSH to one of my hosts to do the update using ESXCLI:
esxcli software vib install –depot=/vmfs/volumes/software/BCM-NetXtremeII-4.0-offline_bundle-1796156.zip
Note: That’s two – – for the depot switch by the way. That went through without a fuss.
I rebooted the ESXi host and after that DVD upgrade went though as normal…
