Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
Determine which ESX/ESXi hosts or VMs need to be patched or upgraded.
Baselines
are the “measuring sticks” whereby VUM knows whether an ESX/ESXi host or VM instance
is up-to-date. VUM compares the ESX/ESXi hosts or VMs to the baselines to determine
whether they need to be patched and, if so, what patches need to be applied. VUM also uses
baselines to determine which ESX/ESXi hosts need to be upgraded to the latest version or
which VMs need to have their VM hardware upgraded. VUM comes with some predei ned
baselines and allows administrators to create additional baselines specii c to their environ-
ments. Baselines can be i xed—the contents remain constant—or they can be dynamic, where
the contents of the baseline change over time. Baseline groups allow administrators to com-
bine baselines and apply them together.
Master It
In addition to ensuring that all your ESX/ESXi hosts have the latest criti-
cal and security patches installed, you need to ensure that all your ESX/ESXi hosts
have another specii c patch installed. This additional patch is noncritical and therefore
doesn't get included in the critical patch dynamic baseline. How do you work around this
problem?
Use VUM to upgrade VM hardware or VMware Tools.
VUM can detect VMs with out-
dated VM hardware versions and guest OSes that have outdated versions of VMware Tools
installed. VUM comes with predei ned baselines that enable this functionality. In addition,
VUM has the ability to upgrade VM hardware versions and upgrade VMware Tools inside
guest OSes to ensure that everything is kept up-to-date. This functionality is especially help-
ful after upgrading your ESX/ESXi hosts to version 5.5 from a previous version.
Master It
You've just i nished upgrading your virtual infrastructure to VMware
vSphere. What two additional tasks should you complete?
Apply patches to ESX/ESXi hosts.
Like other complex software products, VMware ESX
and VMware ESXi need software patches applied from time to time. These patches might be
bug i xes or security i xes. To keep your ESX/ESXi hosts up-to-date with the latest patches,
VUM can apply patches to your hosts on a schedule of your choosing. In addition, to reduce
downtime during the patching process or perhaps to simplify the deployment of patches to
remote ofi ces, VUM can stage patches to ESX/ESXi hosts before the patches are applied.
Master It
How can you avoid VM downtime when applying patches (for example, re-
mediating) to your ESX/ESXi hosts?
Upgrade hosts and coordinate large-scale datacenter upgrades.
Upgrading hosts manu-
ally, each with dozens of VMs on them, is burdensome and doesn't scale well once you have
more than a handful to deal with. Short outage windows, host reboots, and VM downtime
mean that coordinating upgrades can involve complex planning and careful execution.
Master It
Which VUM functionality can simplify the process of upgrading vSphere
across a large number of hosts and their VMs?
Utilize alternative approaches to VUM updates when required.
VUM presents the sim-
plest and most efi cient method to upgrade your vSphere hosts. However, sometimes VUM
may not be available. For example, VUM is reliant on vCenter, so if the host isn't connected to
a licensed vCenter, then an alternate method to upgrade the host must be used.
Master It
Without using VUM, how else can you upgrade an existing host?
