In ESXi 5.1 you can patch using the following command:
esxcli software vib install -d /path/to/patch.zip
If you’re getting the following result (using ESXi510-20121001.zip as an example):
[MetadataDownloadError]
Could not download from depot at zip:/var/log/vmware/ESXi510-201210001.zip?index.xml, skipping ((‘zip:/var/log/vmware/ESXi510-201210001.zip?index.xml’, ”, “Error extracting index.xml from /var/log/vmware/ESXi510-201210001.zip: [Errno 2] No such file or directory: ‘/var/log/vmware/ESXi510-201210001.zip’”))
url = zip:/var/log/vmware/ESXi510-201210001.zip?index.xml
Please refer to the log file for more details.
This results from not putting in the absolute path to the .zip – e.g. using:
esxcli software vib install -d ESXi510-20121001.zip
rather than:
esxcli software vib install -d /vmfs/volumes/datastore/ESXi510-20121001.zip
Putting in the full path to the .zip file should resolve that error.