VMware ESXi – Help Downloading Large ISO Files

vmware-esxivmware-vsphere

I'd like to download a large OS install ISO directly to my datastore. I used to be able to SSH to the ESXi terminal and use wget to download large files directly to the datastore, but it seems that wget can't handle https links anymore (wget: not an http or ftp url).

I'm wondering how others handle this. I know I can download the file to my laptop and use the datastore browser to upload it, but that's a two-step process (not to mention horribly inefficient when I'm offsite and accessing ESX through a VPN).

Thanks in advance for any suggestions!

Best Answer

Around ESXi 6.7, the embedded busybox wget finally started to support https.

So finally, you can do https downloads in ESXi.

Yay!

This is from ESXi 6.7 Update 2.

[root@ESXi-X9SRI-3F:/tmp] wget https://www.example.org
Connecting to www.example.org (93.184.216.34:443)
index.html           100% |******************************************************************************************|  1270  0:00:00 ETA
[root@ESXi-X9SRI-3F:/tmp] wget --help
BusyBox v1.29.3 (2018-11-02 15:37:50 PDT) multi-call binary.

Usage: wget [-c|--continue] [--spider] [-q|--quiet] [-O|--output-document FILE]
    [--header 'header: value'] [-Y|--proxy on/off] [-P DIR]
    [-S|--server-response] [-U|--user-agent AGENT] URL...

Retrieve files via HTTP or FTP

    --spider    Only check URL existence: $? is 0 if exists
    -c      Continue retrieval of aborted transfer
    -q      Quiet
    -P DIR      Save to DIR (default .)
    -S          Show server response
    -O FILE     Save to FILE ('-' for stdout)
    -U STR      Use STR for User-Agent header
    -Y on/off   Use proxy
[root@ESXi-X9SRI-3F:/tmp] vmware -l
VMware ESXi 6.7.0 Update 2

Whereas 6.5U2 still did not support it (I think ESXi 6.7 also did not, but I do not have a box to this this on any more):

[root@ESXi-X10SRH-CF:/tmp] wget https://www.example.org
wget: not an http or ftp url: https://www.example.org
[root@ESXi-X10SRH-CF:/tmp] wget --help
BusyBox v1.22.1 (2018-07-23 19:34:04 PDT) multi-call binary.

Usage: wget [-csq] [-O FILE] [-Y on/off] [-P DIR] [-U AGENT] URL...

Retrieve files via HTTP or FTP

    -s  Spider mode - only check file existence
    -c  Continue retrieval of aborted transfer
    -q  Quiet
    -P DIR  Save to DIR (default .)
    -O FILE Save to FILE ('-' for stdout)
    -U STR  Use STR for User-Agent header
    -Y  Use proxy ('on' or 'off')

[root@ESXi-X10SRH-CF:/tmp] vmware -l
VMware ESXi 6.5.0 Update 2
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