Simplified ESX patching

Here's what I've set up for our VMware ESX servers...

I have a space that's accessible via HTTP (snippet from httpd.conf)

<Directory /usslsbds001/esxpatches>
        Options +Indexes
        Order allow,deny
        Allow from all
</Directory>

Alias /esxpatches/ "/usslsbds001/esxpatches/"

In there, I have directories corresponding to dates VMware has released patches (that I'm interested in)

# pwd
/usslsbds001/esxpatches
# ls -l
total 33
drwxr-xr-x   5 root     root           5 Dec  6 15:24 20071115
drwxr-xr-x   8 root     root           8 Dec  6 15:25 20071130
drwxr-xr-x   3 root     root          13 Dec 12 14:13 latest
drwxr-xr-x   2 root     root          14 Dec 12 14:14 packed

packed has the downloaded tgz files. $YYYYMMDD has the extracted patches for that date, and latest has the unpacked directory of 3.0.2 update 1, and symlinks ESX-1234567 -> ../YYYYMMDD/ESX-1234567. When a patch is superceded, I `chmod 0` it, and remove its link from latest.

I also have a scriptwriter that generates a set of esxupdate commands:

# cat ../latest/make-install.sh
#!/bin/sh
# generate an "install" file for the ESX patches in the current directory

DS=`date +%Y%m%d%H%M`

ls | grep -v install | while read patch ; do
echo "esxupdate -n -r http://`uname -n`/esxpatches/latest/$patch update" >> install.$DS
done

rm -f install && ln -s install.$DS install

All of this rolls together on the ESX service console by simply doing (make sure HTTP client is open in the firewall)

GET http://thestorageplace/esxpatches/latest/install | sh

and rebooting...

--Joe