VIBs Skipped

Well, I didn’t mention it like many might not mention it, while you applying any patches or updates on your “VMware ESXi” hosts, it will show the result which containing the “Successful or Failed” prompt.
Most of times I did this process, I checked the result and walked a way without checking which “VIBs Skipped”.
Until yesterday, which I received a comment on one of my posts which I asked about “VIBs Skipped” the update process; I’ve answered as soon as I saw that but after double checking the KBs and tested my personal theory I decided to make a post about it.

Question:

Even though the update was successful according to the output from the commands, there was a whole list of VIBs skipped. In the output it says “VIBs Skipped: …” and lists a lot of them. Any idea why this is? When using the standard profile in the patch file, I would have thought it would apply all VIBs.

My first answer:

Well, I guess VIBs would be updated only if they are older than presented one which include in patch.
If all VIBs going to be overwritten over and over again, it may cause some problem (1st one is the reboot required) so it will check and skip those VIBs which are OK.
AFAIK and I saw, each update contains all needed files from previous updates so if you already have host with newer source, update process may skip some VIBs.

And now, the main reason:

Let me describe it with one example,  if you trying to update your hosts with first release of “VMware ESXi 5.0” without any update (built number “469512”), using “ESXi500-201112001.zip” patch (built number “515841“) you will only update 6 VIBs as listed below, the other VIBs without update will “Skip” the update process.  😉

Below, you can check the whole process of updating one host using “ESXi500-201112001.zip” and here are the comparison of its VIBs before and after applying the patch.

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