PLANNING

It is a best practice to establish a documented, verifiable method of updating ESXi servers, and additional VMware components, such as the virtual machine hardware, VMware Tools, and virtual appliances. Not only will this allow the administrator to patch and address possible security issues, but it also allows the most updated virtual hardware to be made available to production and test virtual machines. Update Manager from VMware provides an enterprise-level tool to perform these updates from a centralized interface.

Capabilities

The addition of Update Manager to the vCenter environment provides you with the capability to design an automated solution for patching ESXi hosts, upgrading and updating VMware Tools and virtual machine hardware for VMs, and updating any virtual appliances that may be deployed.