How to upgrade Cisco VIC drivers via VMware Update Manager

After upgrading the UCS firmware and installing ESXi on the C220 M5s, I wanted to upgrade the native VIC drivers using offline bundles provided by Cisco.  Of course, I don’t want to have to manually log into each server as suggested by Cisco so we are going to use Update Manager.   This will give us both an easy way to deploy AND also track deployment of the updated drivers.  The process is pretty easy and detailed below.

Step one:  Ignore Cisco manual instructions.
Located here, you can see the manual instructions but you can also use the links to get to the software to download.

Once you have downloaded the software bundle (which is an ISO), you will need to mount that ISO and extract the necessary offline bundle to upload to Update Manager.   Inside the initial ISO, you should see various directories which contain driver bundles.  For the VIC, you can go to the Network folder and then choose the appropriate ESXi version.  Inside that directory, you will find the offline bundle.

After extracting that offline bundle (you should just have the ZIP file downloaded), you can then go to the Update Manager web console and upload the zip to a new baseline.  The baseline type will be a Host Patch.

Importing the new patch should work successfully and you will now have a new baseline that you can apply to your vCenter infrastructure.

When you have a new host added into the environment, these baselines will be applied and you will have an easy way to upgrade the Cisco specific drivers.

This should be WAAY more helpful than the original Cisco directions to upload to each ESXi host and run ESXCLI. 😉

Happy Upgrading!
–Carlo