Tonight Damian did an excellent improv of Host Profiles, VUM, and other Operational Maintenance objective best practices. If you are studying for your VCAP (or maintaining a vSphere environment), you’ll want to watch this.

Video

Incase you have more than a small hand full of vCO vApps handy, you can use vApp functionality in VUM to upgrade vCO. You’ll need to do the following to get that going:

Create the vApp Baseline

Creating a vApp baseline works much like creating other baselines. On the home page of your vSphere client (where you have the VUM plugin installed), click Update Manager. Then “Create…” to stand up a baseline. Give it a name, select VA Baselines:

Add a rule:

Attach the Baseline

To attach the baseline to a VM, you need to be in the VMs and Templates View. Once there, select your vCO VM, then the Update Manager tab, then “Attach…”

For some reason I had to add a baseline group to attach this also, once it’s attached…

Scan

Scan that bad boy:

Remediate

Click remediate, select the vCO Baseline Group we created, then next:

Schedule: Now. Snapshot: No. (You’ll want to change these to fit your environment). Finish.

Troubleshooting

Seems you might run into an issue with the vCO service starting once the vApp has been rebooted post upgrade. To fix it, head on over here.

Summary

So there you go, orchestrated (or at least automated) vCO upgrades in VUM. Go go go!

Before getting into installing, let’s take a second to talk about what the Update Manager Download Service (UMDS) is and when you’d use it. As the name implies, UMDS is a service that will go and fetch patch notifications, metadata, and binaries that is separate from your VUM install.

When would that be useful? In a few scenarios, the first is in highly secure environments, where your VUM server may not have direct internet access, but can access other network segments, like this:

In this case UMDS would download the patches, and then share them back out over HTTP/HTTPS to your VUM installation. The above scenario is also useful when you have multiple VUM installs, yet only want to download the patches once. In that case, you would configure your VUM installs to use the UMDS server as a shared repository.

You can also use UMDS in an “air gapped” network scenario, the difference to the above, is instead of exporting the patch data over http, you would instead export it to an external drive and sneaker net it to the VUM server for import.

Installing the VMware Update Manager Download Service

Now that you know why you would use UMDS (and chances are, you should), let’s take a look at how to get that bad boy installed.

Prerequisites

UMDS requires a few things to get going:

• Either:
  • 32bit DSN to a database to store metadata
  • SQL2008 Express (at install time)
• .NET 3.5
• Database (either external or 2k8 express)
• vSphere Installation Media

Installation

To find the install, open your vSphere Install folder (or mount the ISO, etc) and browse the CD. Then look for the VUM install folder and launch vmware-umds.exe. The install is mostly a bouncing ball type install, the only call-outs I’d make are choosing the DSN you create in the prerequisites and choosing the location to download patches:

Configuration

Ok, so you have it installed, now what? You will still need to run a few CLI commands to tell UMDS what patches you need as well as get them to download. To do this, open a command prompt, and cd to “C:\Program Files (x86)\VMware\Infrastructure\Update Manager”

Configure Where to Download Patches To

To change the location you chose during the installation for patch downloads, the following command will work:

vmware-umds -S –patch-store <location of patch store>

Configure Which Patches to Download

Use this command to configure both host and vApp patches to be pulled down:

vmware-umds -S –enable-host –enable-va

You can execute vmware-umds without any parameters to get a list of all options to download.

Download the Patches

You’ll want to go fetch lunch after firing this one off, least for me it seemed to take AGES to run. However, it’s quite verbose, so it at least looks busy.

vmware-umds -D

Export the Patches

This one also took a long while (hours) but that’s likely due to a lack of spindles on my part.

vmware-umds -E –export-store <export folder>

References

The following materials were used but not harmed in the production of this post:

• http://pubs.vmware.com/vsphere-50/topic/com.vmware.ICbase/PDF/vsphere-update-manager-501-install-administration-guide.pdf
• http://kb.vmware.com/selfservice/microsites/search.do?language=en_US&cmd=displayKC&externalId=1004455
• http://www.jasemccarty.com/blog/?p=1859
• http://virtuallyandy.blogspot.com/2010/01/vmware-update-manager-download-service.html
• http://derek858.blogspot.com/2011/11/schedule-vmware-umds-downloads-with.html

There are a few situations you might want to do this, security and least privileged accounts comes to mind, as does auditability. However, you will also need to do this when your SQL server is using Windows Authentication. Otherwise you’ll run into: “There was an error connecting to VMware Update Manager… Database temporarily unavailable or has network problems” when trying to enable the plugin:

Configure the VUM Service to use a Service Account

The fix is easy however. On the VUM server:

1. Start > Run > Services.msc
2. Select the VUM Service, right click, properties:
   
3. Select the Log On tab, then “This Account”
   
4. Give it a user & password for a user you don’t mind having “Log on as a service” permissions.
5. Ok, and restart the service

Reference: http://kb.vmware.com/kb/1015223

This came up in the comments to one of my other posts, so I though I’d share.

Note: The Host Update Utility was depreciated with 4.1, so if you came here looking for that… my apologies.

The vSphere Host Update Utility, as far as I can tell is not actually offered as a separate download, but is rather bundled with the vSphere client and is a selectable option during installation. As admins most of us are trained to ignore these extra screens (after-all, who wants yet another Friendster toolbar installed?). This one is safe however, promise!

Now that we’ve upgraded our client and installed it on Windows 7, let’s upgrade our ESX or ESXi host:

1. Fire up Host Update Utility & Download new Patches from VMware:

2. Scan for updates:

3. OMG Patches! Lets Patch the host (Make sure the host is in maint mode first!):

4. Install FTW!

5. Now comes the progress bars! (It’s applying the patches):

6. And done!

Questions? Drop a line in the comments.

One of the great things about working in IT, is that software will always need to be updated. If it didn’t, some of us would need to find a new line of work. Just because it needs updating, does not mean we have to like it. In fact, most vendor update processes are needlessly obtuse. Luckily for us VMware helps us along, providing several mechanisms for updates, each offering varying degrees of automation. One of my new favorite bits of awesome here is the “VMware vSphere Host Update Utility”, a needlessly long name for a simple process:

Downloading the patches

I believe the answer to this is yes. What do you think? With this, the Host Update Utility reaches out to VMware’s site and starts pulling down the needed updates (complete with a progress bar:

Adding a host

Simple is as simple does Forest.

Scanning & Updating

Here it gets a bit more fun. Taking a look at where we are now:

Clicking scan prompts for your user and password, then scans. Here’s the result:

Lets upgrade! (Note: The host needs to be in maintenance mode for this part to work)

Install & Grab a Coffee. You’ve earned it.

If like me you accepted most of the defaults the first go around when installing VMware’s Update Manager, you may have found yourself in a situation where there is not enough disk space to contain all of the files. Should this happen, and you need to change the location, you can edit the settings XML file:

“C:\Program Files\VMware\Infrastructure\Update Manager\vci-integrity.xml”

There are two locations you need to edit, <patchstore> and <path> under <docRootHostUpdates>.

Here is an example:

After changing these and restarting the Update Manager service you should be in good shape. NOTE: You may want to copy all of the files from the old location to the new one.

Source: gabesvirtualworld.com

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