Specifications

Within a cluster, you should select to temporarily disable HA admission control to allow vMotion to
proceed, in order to prevent downtime of the machines on the hosts you remediate. After the remediation of
the entire cluster, Update Manager restores HA admission control settings.
If FT is turned on for any of the virtual machines on hosts within a cluster, you should select to temporarily
turn off FT before performing any Update Manager operations on the cluster. If FT is turned on for any of
the virtual machines on a host, Update Manager does not remediate that host. You should remediate all
hosts in a cluster with the same updates, so that FT can be re-enabled after the remediation, because a
primary virtual machine and a secondary virtual machine cannot reside on hosts of different ESX/ESXi
version and patch level.
Perform an Orchestrated Upgrade of Hosts Using vSphere Update Manager
You can use Update Manager to perform orchestrated upgrades of the ESX/ESXi hosts in your vSphere
inventory by using a single upgrade baseline, or by using a baseline group.
This workflow describes the overall process to perform an orchestrated upgrade of the hosts in your
vSphere inventory. Update Manager 5.0 supports host upgrades to ESXi 5.0 for hosts that are running
ESX/ESXi 4.x.
You can perform orchestrated upgrades of hosts at the folder, cluster, or datacenter level.
NOTE The last two steps in this procedure are alternatives. Choose one or the other.
Prerequisites
n
Make sure your system meets the requirements for vCenter Server 5.0, ESXi 5.0, and Update Manager
5.0. See “Update Manager Hardware Requirements,” on page 25
n
Install or upgrade vCenter Server to version 5.0. See Chapter 4, “Upgrading to vCenter Server 5.0,” on
page 27.
n
Install or upgrade vSphere Update Manager to version 5.0. See Chapter 5, “Upgrading Update
Manager,” on page 73.
Procedure
1 Configure Host Maintenance Mode Settings on page 102
ESX/ESXi host updates might require that the host enters maintenance mode before they can be
applied. Update Manager puts the ESX/ESXi hosts in maintenance mode before applying these
updates. You can configure how Update Manager responds if the host fails to enter maintenance
mode.
2 Configure Cluster Settings on page 103
For ESX/ESXi hosts in a cluster, the remediation process can run either in a sequence or in parallel.
Certain features might cause remediation failure. If you have VMware DPM, HA admission control, or
Fault Tolerance enabled, you should temporarily disable these features to make sure that the
remediation is successful.
3 Enable Remediation of PXE Booted ESXi 5.0 Hosts on page 104
You can configure Update Manager to let other software initiate remediation of PXE booted ESXi 5.x
hosts. The remediation installs patches and software modules on the hosts, but typically the host
updates are lost after a reboot.
4 Import Host Upgrade Images and Create Host Upgrade Baselines on page 105
You can create upgrade baselines for ESX/ESXi hosts with ESXi 5.x images that you import to the
Update Manager repository.
Chapter 6 Upgrading and Migrating Your Hosts
VMware, Inc. 101