How to update your standalone host to ESXi 5.5

VMware has released vSphere 5.5 (and other related product updates)

Duncan Epping has posted a list of all download links on his blog.

In this post I will provide a quick way to update your standalone ESXi host to ESXi 5.5

How to update to ESXi 5.5

If your host is connected to the Internet then you just need to run the following commands in an ESXi shell:

# open firewall for outgoing http requests:
esxcli network firewall ruleset set -e true -r httpClient

# Install the ESXi 5.5 GA Imageprofile from the VMware Online depot

esxcli software profile update -d https://hostupdate.vmware.com/software/VUM/PRODUCTION/main/vmw-depot-index.xml -p ESXi-5.5.0-1331820-standard

It might be very important to use update and not install here! More on this later. Reboot the host to complete the update.