With the release of vSphere 6.5, vSphere Update Manager (VUM) was inegrated with VCSA which made customers very happy as we no longer needed an additional windows server for installing VUM.  

With vSphere 6.7, VMware integraded few of the VUM funtionality in the new HTML5 client. Not all the features are available in HTML5 client and few features like VUM configuration changes, VMware tools upgrade etc can only be performed via vSphere Web Client (flash).

VMware is working hard on incorporating all the VUM features in the new HTML5 client as soon as possible and we might see them in upcoming updates of vSphere 6.7. Isn’t it exciting to get rid of flash based Web Client (yeah screw that VMware !!!)

I have written few posts on vSphere 6.7 earlier. You can read those posts from below links:

Installing and Configuring Esxi 6.7

Installing and Configuring VCSA 6.7

So whats enhancements vSphere 6.7 brought for VUM?

Quick Boot 

Upgrading from vSphere 6.7 to a higher version (6.7.x) don’t required any hardware reboots and it saves time an Esxi host spends in maintenance mode during remediation. Consider this as a guest os level restart. No more waiting for BIOS/Firmware initialization.

As of now very limited servers are whitelisted for quick boot. To check if your server is compatible with Quick Boot, run this command on the Esxi host

 

 

For more information about Quick Boot compatibility, please see VMware 

How Quick Boot can save your life?

If you have a N+1 cluster configuration and which is fully populated, the risk of higher downtime for VM’s in case another host fails during upgradation process is reduced. If your server supports quick boot, the maintenance window for host upgrade is reduced and thus your server comes online real fast. 

 

Single Reboot on host upgrades

Now you don’t need to reboot your Esxi hosts several time to finish the host upgrade process. All updates will be applied on host during a single reboot window. This significantly eases the host upgrade tasks and make life of VMware admins easy. 

Lets do a walkthrough of HTML5 client to see what features are available there and whats not.

From Menu option select Update Manager

Download updated patches functionality is there. For this to work your VCSA should have internet conenctivity or you should have UMDS setup. 

New baselines can be created. 

Newly created baseline can be associated with host/cluster

Compliance check is there

Remediation Pre-check

Before applying a baseline (remediation) you should run the remediation pre-check. This will check for cluster and Virtual Machine issues that may prevent a successful remediation.

To perform remediatin pre-check, select the cluster and navigate to updates tab and click Pre-check Remediation .

Clicking on “Open Pre-Check Documenttaion”, will take you here so that you can lear more about this feature.

But the main configuration settings are still with flash based Web Client. Will e good to see when this is also integrated in the html5 client.

In my lab, my esxi hosts are not supporting the quick boot feature, so I can’t demonstrate the same in this post. I have to wait until vmware adds supports for quick boot for nested esxi.

And that’s it for this post.

Additional Reading

vSphere Update Manager 6.7-Release Notes

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