Patching the vCenter Server Appliance by Using the Appliance Shell

You can use the software-packages utility in the appliance shell of a vCenter Server appliance to see the installed patches, stage new patches, and install new patches.

To perform ISO-based patching, you download an ISO image, mount the ISO image to the CD/DVD drive of the appliance, optionally stage the available patches from the ISO image to the appliance, and install the patches. For steps to mount the ISO image to the CD/DVD drive, see Configure a Datastore ISO File for the CD/DVD Drive section in the vSphere Virtual Machine Administration.

To perform URL-based patching, you optionally stage the available patches from a repository URL to the appliance and install the patches. The vCenter Server appliance is preset with a default VMware repository URL for the build profile of the appliance. You can use the update.set command to configure the appliance to use the default VMware repository URL or a custom repository URL, for example, a repository URL that you previously built on a local Web server running within your data center. You can also use the proxy.set command to configure a proxy server for the connection between the vCenter Server appliance and the repository URL.