I’ve been working on a project to upgrade vCentre from 6.0 to 6.5. This meant that multiple Dell (R530, R630, R730) hosts required an update of ESX (using Update Manager). Unfortunately these upgrades failed (first time around) due to the custom VIBs within previous Dell Customized Images of ESXi conflicting with native drivers within ESX6.5. Below is the cheat-sheet of commands to remove these. 

vSphere CLI commands. These can be executed by enabling SSH on ESX host and connecting via Putty

List VIBs (Matching “QLC”)

esxcli software vib list | grep QLC

List VIBs (All)

esxcli software vib list

List VIBs (Network) (Check you don’t disconnect yourself)

esxcli network nic list

Remove VIBs (example scsi-mtip32xx-scsi)

esxcli software vib remove -n scsi-mtip32xx-scsi

Host Maintenance Mode

esxcli system maintenanceMode set --enable true

Host Reboot (Needs to be in maintenance mode)

esxcli system shutdown reboot --reason Upgrades

Notes: The vSphere CLI has been superseded by PowerCLI. PowerCLI is distributed as a Windows PowerShell snapin (PowerCLI 6.0 introduced PowerShell module), and includes over 500 PowerShell cmdlets for managing and automating vSphere and vCloud, along with documentation and samples. 

Reference: https://docs.vmware.com/en/VMware-vSphere/5.5/com.vmware.vsphere.upgrade.doc/GUID-7FFEBD91-5D82-4E32-93AB-F10D8BFFECAA.html