Update ESXi Fails With “DependencyError, Requirement Cannot Be Satisfied Within The ImageProfile”

Was contacted a few days ago by customer who got the following error when trying to upgrade their ESXi hosts.

[DependencyError]
VIB VMware_bootbank_esx-base_6.0.0-2.43.4192238 requires vsan >= 6.0.0-2.43, but the requirement cannot be satisfied within the ImageProfile.
VIB VMware_bootbank_esx-base_6.0.0-2.43.4192238 requires vsan << 6.0.0-2.44, but the requirement cannot be satisfied within the ImageProfile.
Please refer to the log file for more details.

From VMware ESXi 6.0 Update 2 and onwards the component Virtual SAN (vSAN) 6.2 is bundled as a VIB in the ESXi ISO and this is clearly stated in the VMware public release notes.

I will not discuss why the customer used esxcli to perform the upgrade, that’s just the way it is for the sake of this blog post.

Anyway, the following command was used when trying to perform the upgrade:

esxcli software vib update -d /vmfs/volumes/ctr01/iso/ESXi-4192238-offline-bundle-A04.zip

I have seem similar errors before and you need to use the following command syntax to complete the upgrade:

esxcli software profile update -d <full_path_to_offline_bundle> -p <Image Profile>

To get the -p which is the image profile (from the offline bundle) you will update the host with you simple run the following command:

esxcli software sources profile list -d /vmfs/volumes/ctr01/iso/ESXi-4192238-offline-bundle-A04.zip

In my case the command come back with the following:

So to complete the ESXi upgrade I told my customer to run the below command:

esxcli software profile update -d /vmfs/volumes/ctr01/iso/ESXi-4192238-offline-bundle-A04.zip -p Dell-ESXi-6.0U2-4192238-A04

The command come back with:

Then just stop any running VMs, which is my customers case was the Nutanix Controller Virtual Machines (CVMs), on each ESXi host / Nutanix node and then reboot it.