Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
A reboot of the guest OS is often required after the VMware Tools upgrade is complete,
although this varies from guest OS to guest OS. Windows guests with a version of VMware
Tools prior to 5.1 will require a reboot, so plan accordingly. vSphere 5.1 introduced the “zero
downtime” tools upgrade, which is designed to minimize guest reboots after the tools have
been updated. Updates to certain device drivers still mean a reboot is necessary, but the inci-
dence has been signii cantly reduced. The Knowledge Base article at
http://kb.vmware.com
/kb/2015163 details the circumstances that still require a reboot.
Where multiple VMs are joined together in a vApp, VUM and vCenter Server will coordinate
restarting the VMs within the vApp to satisfy inter-VM dependencies unless you turned off
Smart Reboot in the VUM coni guration.
When you are dealing with VMs brought into a VMware vSphere environment from previ-
ous versions of VMware Infrastructure, you must be sure to i rst upgrade VMware Tools to the
latest version and then deal with upgrading VM hardware. This process is explained at the end
of the section “Upgrading Hosts with vSphere Update Manager.” By upgrading the VMware
Tools i rst, you ensure that the appropriate drivers are already loaded into the guest OS when
you upgrade the VM hardware.
Upgrading Virtual Appliances and Host Extensions
Once again, you follow the same overall procedure to upgrade virtual appliances and host
extensions in VUM as you did with VMware Tools in the previous section:
1.
Attach the baseline.
2.
Scan for compliance.
3.
Remediate.
However, it is worth noting that both virtual appliances and host extensions are less likely to
be upgraded quite so routinely. When upgraded, they are replaced wholesale, and their settings
are migrated across to the new version.
Virtual appliances and host extensions often come from third-party hardware or software
providers. Each vendor will make its own decisions regarding what changes to functionality are
included in these upgrades. For some, you may i nd that the upgrade includes merely minor bug
i xes and no change in the way the appliance or extension works. Another upgrade might bring
signii cant changes to how it operates.
For this reason, it is prudent to treat each upgrade to a virtual appliance or host extension as
something that needs to be tested thoroughly before running a wide-scale upgrade.
Now let's look at the last major piece of VUM's functionality: upgrading vSphere hosts.
Upgrading Hosts with vSphere Update Manager
Upgrading vSphere ESXi 5.
x
to the newest versions when they become available, and upgrading
legacy vSphere 4.
x
ESX and ESXi hosts to ESXi 5.5, is principally a three-stage process. Although
ESX and ESXi are fundamentally very different hypervisors, VUM can seamlessly upgrade
