vSphere Update Manager and the vCenter Support Tools
Nicholas Marshall, Mike Brown, G. Blair Fritz, Ryan Johnson · 2018
This chapter reviews the vSphere Update Manager (VUM) plug-in within the vSphere Web Client, and determines which ESXi hosts or VMs need to be patched or upgraded. It helps administrators to upgrade hosts and coordinate large-scale data center upgrades, use alternative approaches to vSphere Update Manager updates when required, and start and configure vSphere Auto Deploy and vSphere ESXi Image Builder services. The chapter then helps administrators to create an image profile and map it to a vSphere Auto Deploy deployment rule, configure vSphere ESXi Dump Collector, and configure hosts for centralized logging. VUM is a tool designed to help VMware administrators automate and streamline the process of applying updates to their vSphere environment. The vSphere Auto Deploy server is where the various ESXi image profiles are stored. This works in conjunction with the vSphere ESXi Image Builder service.