Update Manager – VMware Virtual Center for Patching Activities
Posted on August 23rd, 2008 in Virtualization | 3 Comments »
After couple of months we had performed the patch activities for our ESX hosts and VM guests by using the Update Manager, here is my review of the Update Manager from VMware.
Update Manager had simplified the life of the system engineers who manage the VM farm with the huge number of VM guests and ESX hosts which may require a frequent patch update. Before the Update Manager released, most of the time we had patched the server by using satellite servers, Altiris, SMS and others patching tools. That will require additional cost required to be implemented on the VM guests or ESX host due to the licensing agreement from the vendor.
Update Manager is fully compatible with VMware ESX patches update for ESX 3.0, 3.5 and ESX 3i. From the Host level, you will able to get all the patches downloaded by the update manager schedule task once the VMware had officially release their patch on their official system. Update Manager had also integrated well with Microsoft patches as well as others famous software patches like Red Hat, Adobe and etc. It even allow us to patch the template image which we store for deployment purpose, without manual interaction to convert the template back to virtual machine. If you try to patch a windows 2003 template image, the entire process is fully automated. This is really impressive. I had also patch my DR servers which is 30 miles away from my major Data Center, and we had 30 Mb MPLS across the WAN, it worked perfectly without any issue at all, and of course, the patching timing will be slightly longer due to the location of the DR servers.
To get the update manager deployed in your environment, here are couple of steps you may need to configure before it could fully function.
A dedicated DB for update manager in the SQL or Oracle – Depend on the choice of database servers you are using. This Database will store all the information and patches to be used for patching purpose. If you have proxy server in your environment, you need to configure the proxy address and port number in the virtual center configuration for Update Manager. Schedule task to refresh and check the latest patches release from the official site, recommend to run the schedule task at least once in a week. I do schedule it to be run on weekly basis, to ensure you getting the latest patches when you try to patch you VM guest or ESX host.
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