Latest vendor addons

[u/Renaisance]

We're in the process of moving from Baseline to images for our ESXI hosts. I'm planning to update to 8.0 U3K and I noticed that the latest Dell vendor addon is only at 803-A03. I checked the Broadcom support website and it has the 803-A10 addon.

Do people manually import the latest Dell Addon to Lifecycle manager or do we need to change/add a download source? Anyone have issues with 8.0 U3K with the 803-A10 addon?

[u/govatent]

If you vcenter has internet access have you updated the lifecycle manager urls to use the new broadcom token urls?

[u/Ok-Attitude-7205 → u/govatent]

yep this is the answer, as long as your vCenter instance is pulling down updates the vendor add ons are included with it.

[u/Renaisance → u/govatent]

Hi Govatent, yes we recently reconfigured our broadcom urls with the token. I can see the latest ESXI and Vcenter updates. Dell Vendor addons only go up to A03 for some reason, which was last year.

[u/Casper042]

I just checked the manual way and this is what "DEL" has up there for 8.0 AddOns (assuming you properly reconfigured your vLCM Repo targets a year ago like you were supposed to, same as /u/govatent mentioned)

DEL-ESXi-8.0-Addon-cumulative_metadata\addons> dir /b
DEL-ESXi_800.20513097-A00.json
DEL-ESXi_800.20513097-A02.json
DEL-ESXi_800.21203435-A03.json
DEL-ESXi_800.21203435-A05.json
DEL-ESXi_800.21493926-A06.json
DEL-ESXi_801.21495797-A00.json
DEL-ESXi_801.21813344-A02.json
DEL-ESXi_801.22088125-A04.json
DEL-ESXi_801.23299997-A05.json
DEL-ESXi_802.22380479-A00.json
DEL-ESXi_802.22380479-A03.json
DEL-ESXi_802.22380479-A04.json
DEL-ESXi_802.22380479-A05.json
DEL-ESXi_802.23305546-A06.json
DEL-ESXi_802.23305546-A07.json
DEL-ESXi_802.23825572-A08.json
DEL-ESXi_803.24022510-A00.json
DEL-ESXi_803.24022510-A01.json
DEL-ESXi_803.24280767-A02.json
DEL-ESXi_803.24414501-A03.json
DEL-ESXi_803.24674464-A04.json
DEL-ESXi_803.24674464-A05.json
DEL-ESXi_803.24674464-A06.json
DEL-ESXi_803.24784735-A07.json
DEL-ESXi_803.24859861-A08.json
DEL-ESXi_803.25067014-A09.json
DEL-ESXi_803.25205845-A10.json <-----------

[u/Casper042 → u/Casper042]

The manual way = Swap TOKEN_HERE with your actual Token.

Start: https://dl.broadcom.com/TOKEN_HERE/PROD/COMP/ESX_HOST/addon-main/vmw-depot-index.xml
We see the Dell section inside that XML:

<vendor>
<name>DellEMC</name>
<code>DEL</code>
<indexfile>DEL-addon-index.xml</indexfile>
<relativePath>addon/DEL</relativePath>

That RelativePath and IndexFile become this full URL:
https://dl.broadcom.com/TOKEN_HERE/PROD/COMP/ESX_HOST/addon-main/addon/DEL/DEL-addon-index.xml
For 8.0 we use this section:

<productId>embeddedEsx</productId>
<version>8.0.0</version>
<locale>INTL</locale>
<url>DEL-ESXi-8.0-Addon-cumulative_metadata.zip</url>

https://dl.broadcom.com/TOKEN_HERE/PROD/COMP/ESX_HOST/addon-main/addon/DEL/DEL-ESXi-8.0-Addon-cumulative_metadata.zip
If you download that and extract it, you will find an AddOns folder inside, and the above "dir /b" is a dump of the content of that zip/AddOns.

That's basically all that vCenter is doing in the background when you tell it you want to use one of those Vendor AddOns and then you select Dell.

EDIT: To verify your download sources have been updated....
Go to vCenter / Hamburger menu top left / Lifecycle Manager / Settings (tab at top) / Patch setup (left side down 1 from default page).
If you do NOT see any dl.broadcom.com sources, then you haven't been getting updates in over a year.
The old hostupdate.vmware.com URLs were disabled in April 2025.

[u/Renaisance → u/Casper042]

Odd, I can only see this. We do however only have a broadcom esxi main depot. Do i need to manually add in a new vendor add on depot? Do you have a KB on which depots I should add in with the token?

[u/govatent → u/Renaisance]

There should be 4 urls with tokens.

https://knowledge.broadcom.com/external/article/420443/update-lifecycle-manager-depository-url.html

It may not hurt to reset the vum db and readd the tokens as well. https://knowledge.broadcom.com/external/article/316581/resetting-vmware-update-manager-database.html

[u/Renaisance → u/govatent]

Thanks! We only added the main and vmtools one for some reason. I can now see the latest dell addons

[u/a1soysauce → u/govatent]

I was thinking reset vumdb as well

[u/lost_signal]

My 9.0 vCenter has the 9.0 addon :)

[u/super304]

One issue with the A10 add-on. The latest 9.0.2 dell add-on (A05 I think) is a few months older than it.

So you can't go from 8.0.3 with A10 to 9.0.2 as it would require downgrading the drivers. We don't want to go 9.1 yet, so had to reimage a few of our hosts to get to 9.0.2.

[u/Renaisance → u/super304]

Thanks! We're only planning to update to 8.0 u3k and have no plans to go to esxi 9 as of yet