Offline upgrade of ESXi hosts to 5.5 U2

This is a quick post to show you how to upgrade your ESXi hosts to vSphere 5.5 U2 without the use of vCenter Update Manager, and also to remind me for later updates.  I currently use vCenter Update Manager to upgrade my production hosts but it's not worth deploying another instance for my nested environment and unfortunately you can only have one vCenter Update Manager per vCenter instance.  So, first thing to do is download the vSphere 5.5 U2 offline bundle:

Next you need to upload the offline bundle .zip to a datastore that's accessible by all ESXi hosts that you wish to upgrade.  In my example I'm going to use IX2-ISCSI-TestLab:

Once the .zip is uploaded place the host you wish to upgrade into maintenance mode and SSH into the host and run the following command to list the image profiles that are in that offline bundle:

esxcli software sources profile list -d /vmfs/volumes/IX2-ISCSI-TestLab/update-from-esxi5.5-5.5_update02-2068190.zip

Select the profile that you want to install and run the following command:

esxcli software profile update -d /vmfs/volumes/IX2-ISCSI-TestLab/update-from-esxi5.5-5.5_update02-2068190.zip -p ESXi-5.5.0-20140902001-standard

Once completed you will be instructed to reboot the host:

Once the host reboots the version should now show as 5.5 U2:

Simply take it out of maintenance mode and upgrade the remaining hosts in the cluster and don't forget about updating VMtools on all your VM's

Happy offline updating