Best Practices for ESXi

[Jaimes White]

Hello all!

Just trying to gather some info on the best way to handle ESXi updates on UCS servers. It's my understanding that we should only use the custom Cisco ISOs for this. Does anyone know if there's documentation stating as such? Or are we able to use the incremental updates that VMWare puts out? 

Currently running ESXi 6.7 U3 GA which was put out 08/20/2019.. Haven't seen anything newer and my IA team is pinging me to get these updated to address vulnerabilities.

[Wes Austin]

Typically you will use the Custom ISO to install the OS for the first time to get ESXi installed so it is able to identify the network/storage adapters. After this, you can install whichever drivers you would like, however, we recommend following the drivers listed here as they are supported and tested from Cisco:

https://ucshcltool.cloudapps.cisco.com/public/ 

You can update drivers manually through esxcli or using some third party tool, VUM, automation, etc.

[Steven Tardy]

https://community.cisco.com/t5/unified-computing-system/going-blind-newer-custom-esxi-image-than-u3-from-2019/m-p/4160094#M31504