Chapter 4

Installing and Configuring vSphere Update Manager

Software patches are an unfortunate fact of life in today's IT departments. Most organizations recognize that software updates are necessary to correct problems or flaws and to add new fea-tures. Fortunately, VMware offers a tool to help centralize, automate, and manage these patches for vSphere. This tool is called vSphere Update Manager (VUM).

In this chapter you will learn to

  • Install VUM and integrate it with the vSphere Client
  • Determine which hosts or VMs need to be patched or upgraded
  • Use VUM to upgrade VM hardware or VMware Tools
  • Apply patches to ESXi hosts and older ESX hosts
  • Upgrade hosts and coordinate large-scale datacenter upgrades
  • Utilize alternative approaches to VUM updates ...

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