Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
the vendor's appliance, the vendor will likely provide a new version of its appliance to take
advantage of the new hardware version.
By combining some of the different features of VUM, you can greatly simplify the process of
upgrading your virtualized infrastructure to the latest version of VMware vSphere through an
orchestrated upgrade.
Performing an Orchestrated Upgrade
A specii c use case for baseline groups is the
orchestrated
upgrade
. For an orchestrated upgrade,
you run a host baseline group and a VM/VA baseline group sequentially to help automate the
process of moving an organization's environment fully into VMware vSphere 5.5. Quite simply,
it upgrades your hosts and then your VMs in one job.
Consider this sequence of events:
1.
You create a host baseline group that combines a host upgrade baseline with a dynamic
host patch baseline to apply the latest updates.
2.
You create a VM baseline group that combines two different VM upgrade baselines—the
VMware Tools upgrade baseline and the VM hardware upgrade baseline.
3.
You schedule the host baseline group to execute, followed at some point by the VM base-
line group.
4.
The host baseline group upgrades the hosts from ESX/ESXi 4.
x
and ESXi 5.0/5.1 to
ESXi 5.5 and installs all applicable patches and updates.
5.
The VM baseline group upgrades VMware Tools and then upgrades the VM hardware to
version 10.
When these two baseline groups have completed, all the hosts and VMs affected by the
baselines will be upgraded and patched. Most, if not all, of the tedious tasks surrounding the
VMware Tools and VM hardware upgrade have been automated. Congratulations! You've just
simplii ed and automated the upgrade path for your virtual environment.
Investigating Alternative Update Options
In most circumstances, using the VUM tools in the vSphere Client is the easiest and most efi -
cient method of keeping your hosts, VMs, and virtual appliances patched and at the latest,
greatest level. However, there are sometimes circumstances where you want to look beyond the
standard tools and investigate the alternatives. As you'll learn, vSphere can be updated in
several other ways.
Using vSphere Update Manager PowerCLI
vSphere takes advantage of Microsoft's PowerShell scripting environment with the PowerCLI
extensions that are discussed in Chapter 14, “Automating VMware vSphere.”
Without getting ahead of ourselves, it's worth noting the PowerCLI tools that are available
to script many of VUM's functions. The VUM PowerCLI cmdlets cover the most common tasks,
