Thanks very helpful, but I am still confused by the fact that there are general and security-only images, sometimes previous patches are not included! I think they are only included when there is a base-image, the author of the article you refrered too is mentioning this as well, in particluar for drivers, hence my concern.
[EDIT] ok, reading again, the esx-base is updated in the first patch, then the second update is doing again the esx-base and therefor it superseeds the patch1, right?
Now regards my NIC driver I understand the switch is very important as Kyle is mentioning in his thread: When you run “esxcli software profile install …” it installs the image in the depot overwriting the existing image. In your case you have a VIB on your host that provides drivers needed for you NICs. This VIB is not included as part of the 5.0 U1 update (probably came from Dell?). So when you “installed” the update you lost this driver and hence the drivers were gone. After restoring from the alternate bootbank the VIB was restored. Then, when you repeated the install using the UPDATE switch instead of overwriting the image, it updated any VIBs on the host for which an updated version was available in the depot and added any VIBs that were missing, but it did not remove any VIBs.
“esxcli software profile install“: Installs or applies an image profile from a depot to this host. This command completely replaces the installed image with the image defined by the new image profile, and may result in the loss of installed VIBs. To preserve installed VIBs, use profile update instead.
“esxcli software profile update“: Updates the host with VIBs from an image profile in a depot. Installed VIBs may be upgraded (or downgraded if –allow-downgrades is specified), but they will not be removed. Any VIBs in the image profile which are not related to any installed VIBs will be added to the host.
So I need to adjust one parameter; make it update instead of install to prevent my NIC driver [vib] from being overwritten.
- esxcli software vib update -d /vmfs/volumes/5056099d-2af1d31a-9336-0025907cb294/ESXi510-201210001.zip