On the VMTN forum I read a cool solution for clearing your update cache when you use a web repository for patching your ESX hosts: “yum clean all”. Never thought of that cause I hardly use a web repository, always use a VMFS volume and the vmprofessional script.
I just found out about this command today, and going from ESX 3.0.1 to ESX 3.0.2 – Update 1 my 5GB / partition ran out of space suddenly. Looking over the disk, I realized that yum was suddenly consuming a little over 2GB. I looked around and found this command and added it to my esxupdate scripts and it made such a difference!
If you do manage systems in many locations, a web repository is a great tool, and this command really helps a lot and is a welcome addition to the toolkit. Thanks for posting this info.