Getting an overview of patches for your ESX hosts

A customer asked for an overview of which patches exactly were needed for his ESX hosts. He wanted to review the patches before they were applied with Update Manager. Unfortunately, you can't get the list from the gui in a nice way, so some PowerCLI goodness was needed.

First off, you need to have the Update Manager cmdlets installed to be able to use the Get-Compliance cmdlet in the code.

The following script will go over each host, and output the severity, patch ID, release date, additional info (a link to the kb article) and a short update to what the patch is for.

It will look something like this:

HostSecurity,ESX410-201204402-SG,"4/26/2012 10:00:00 AM","For more information, see http://kb.vmware.com/kb/2014988.","Updates libxml2"

Now for the code itself:

ForEach ($HostToCheck in Get-VMHost){

$Details = Get-Compliance $HostToCheck -Detailed| Select -ExpandProperty NotCompliantPatches| Select @{N="Hostname";E={$HostToCheck}}, Severity, IdByVendor, ReleaseDate, Description, Name

$ComplianceResult += $Details

}

$ComplianceResult | Export-CSV -Path c:\NeededPatches.CSV -NoType