Patching ESXi single host

For ESXi 4.0 and below, patching can be done with vSphere Host Update Utility.

For ESXi 4.1, vSphere Host Update Utility is no longer supported. Patch using command line:

1) Download patch bundles from VMware's support website: www.vmware.com/patch/download/

2) Upload the patch bundles to your datastore. (You can use vSphere client to do this.)

3) Put the ESXi host into maintenance mode.

4) SSH into the ESXi box. This blog shows how to enable SSH on ESXi 4.1.

5) CD to the datastore and use esxupdate --bundle to patch ESXi:
cd /vmfs/volumes/datastore0/patches
esxupdate --bundle ./ESXi410-201011001.zip update

Creating a Acrobat Reader 9.3.3 AIP (administrative install point)

Adobe has one of most convoluted way of doing patches, and as a system administrator, this is a huge headache to maintain Acrobat Reader updated across your enterprise to prevent security breaches via Acrobat.

To understand Acrobat's release cycle, I'll point you to this page.

To summarize, Adobe has two type of patch releases: quarterly, and out of cycle security fix (and these happen quite often). However, to create a network installation point, one that is using msi deployment methods and fully up to date (9.3.3 as of writing) you have to follow a specific update path - you're only allowed to patch your AIP using quarterly patches. Again, that is outlined in the link above.

Adobe Reader:

For creating 9.3.3 AIP: 9.3 > 9.3.2 > 9.3.3
For creating 9.3.2 AIP: 9.3 > 9.3.2
For creating 9.3.1 AIP: 9.3 > 9.3.1

This means, if you have created a 9.3.1 AIP, you'll have to do whole process from 9.3 start again, because 9.3.1 was a security patch.

Today, I need a 9.3.3 AIP, so here's the steps I used:

1) Download 9.3 from here.

2) Extract setup package into its source (.msi):

AdbeRdr930_en_US.exe -nos_ne -nos_o"aip_directory"
Info on the switches can be found here.

3) Download 9.3.2 and 9.3.3 patches from here.

4) Apply 9.3.2 to the AIP like this:

msiexec /a "aip_directory\AcroRead.msi" /p "AdbeRdrUpd932_all_incr.msp"

5) Apply 9.3.3 to the AIP like this:

"msiexec /a aip_directory\AcroRead.msi /p AdbeRdrUpd933_all_incr.msp"

Now your aip_directory will contain a fully patched (9.3.3) version of Acrobat Reader. You can simply deploy the .msi file in it.

EDIT (Dec 20, 2010): Adobe changed some of the links, so I update the links to reflect the chanage. I tested the procedure for Acrobat Reader 9.4.1.