New service: The VMware ESXi Patch Tracker


A while back I was looking for an easy way to stay up to date with VMware ESXi patches. VMware provides a lot of RSS feeds that keep you updated on new blog posts, new KB articles, security advisories etc., but ... I could not find anything that would just ping me whenever an ESXi patch was released.  The closest thing that I found was a link named "Get New Patch Alert" on the My VMware Patch Download Portal. That will refer you to the profile settings of your MyVMware account where you can manage various subscriptions including something that should keep you updated on new releases and patches of all sorts of VMware products. However, this just never worked for me, I never got a single e-mail out of this (anyone?), so I must assume that this service is not functional.

I finally decided to develop something on my own and provide that as a service to the community. So here is what I call the ...
... VMware ESXi Patch Tracker! Basically that is a set of web pages that list all available patch releases for every ESXi version (starting with version 5.0) including extensive information about what was updated, version numbers, links to corresponding KB articles and more.

The big thing now is that these pages are generated fully automatically and updated in regular intervals so that you will always find the most current patch at the top! There are multiple RSS feeds available that you can subscribe to (one for each ESXi version and one for all) and - on top of that - you can also subscribe by e-mail and/or follow the bot @ESXiPatches on Twitter that will send out a tweet as soon as a new patch is released.

In other words: if you want to keep up to date with ESXi patches, or just want to get more information about a specific patch - then this service is for you! Please read the details on the Welcome/Help page, then check it out and enjoy!


This post first appeared on the VMware Front Experience Blog and was written by Andreas Peetz. Follow him on Twitter to keep up to date with what he posts.



7 comments:

  1. This is awesome. Thank you for the feeds!

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  2. Very convenient! Thank you!

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  3. Andreas, thanks so much for the tracker! It is incredibly useful and convenient. The esxcli commands how-to is awesome.

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  4. Lieber Andreas,

    Danke so much für this service! However, the latest patch it displays for 5.5 (2015.04.30) is not available on VMware product patches site, only the 2015.04.07. version. Is there any scientific reason for that?

    Rgrds - M. Gy.

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    1. Hi Gyula,

      the latest ESXi 5.5 patch has been recalled by VMware because it causes a critical issue (see KB2116370). I will remove it from the ESXi-Patches site.

      Andreas

      Delete

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