As most of you aware, vSphere 6.5 Update 1 is now available and it has some great new features and enhancements that are part of it.
The most asked feature was supporting the migration of vCenter Server 6.0 Update 3 migration. Finally, vSphere 6.5 Update 1 will allow customers who are currently on vSphere 6.0 Update 3 to upgrade to vSphere 6.5 Update 1.
And my favorite feature that has been added in this update is the vSAN VUM Integration which makes management of the vSAN clusters extremely easy. Read along to see what this integration is and how you can benefit from it if you are using vSAN in your environment.
vSphere Update Manager has been around for a very long time and it performs patching and upgrading of the ESXi hosts in a cluster without any downtime.
Let us take a look at the requirements in order to be able to start using the vSAN VUM Integration in vSphere 6.5 Update 1.
- vCenter Server 6.5 Update 1.
- VMware Update Manager 6.5 Update 1.
- ESXi 6.0 U2 and later.
- Internet access to my.vmware.com is required.
- Internet access or Offline access to vSAN HCL database.
With the vSAN VUM Integration in vSphere 6.5 Update 1, vSAN version recommendations are automatically generated using information from the VMware Compatibility Guide, the vSAN Release Catalog, and awareness of the underlying hardware configuration.
All of this through system baselines that are created automatically once the vSphere Update Manager configuration is done.
The first step is to add your my.vmware.com credentials to the vSAN Build Recommendation Engine.
After successful login vSAN will generate a baseline group of recommended updates for each vSAN cluster. vSAN system baselines are listed in the Baselines pane of the Baselines and Groups tab.
These system baselines are Read-only and they are of three types:
- Update/Upgrade Baseline.
- Patch Baseline.
- Driver Baseline.
All of these Baselines are then compiled into a Baseline Group, one per vSAN cluster.
Once the baselines are created, you can click on the vSAN cluster and see that the ESXi hosts will be Non-compliant.
Now, these hosts can be remediated through the normal remediation function of the VMware Update Manager. The Remediate wizard offers several options to customize the upgrade:
- Select the desired hosts as the target of your remediation.
- Schedule the upgrade to run immediately or at a later date and time.
- Specify Maintenance Mode options (i.e. VM power state, removable media handling and ESXi patch settings)
- Specify cluster remediation options. When remediating a cluster, you should temporarily disable certain cluster features. Update Manager will automatically re-enable the features after remediation.
Once the options are selected, Update Manager will perform a rolling upgrade of the hosts in the vSAN cluster in a seamless manner without any further user intervention.
If you are the types who like videos to follow along, below is a Youtube from Pete Fletcha showing the vSAN VUM Integration in vSphere Update 1.
Note: System Baselines at this time do not check Firmware or Product Interoperability at this time, so keep that in mind.
I hope this has informative and thank you for reading.
