Update Manager

This might not be a new one to a lot of folk, but it certainly was to me! This week I was proactively updating some NIC driver and firmware for a customer to avoid a known issue where the FCoE driver could cause an ESXi Purple Screen of Death (PSOD). Both firmware and drivers needed to be upgraded to maintain interoperability. While I am very much looking forward to vSphere Lifecycle Manager (finally!) to manage this in a single workflow, for this task I did what I normally would do: ...

Every now and then I need to find the version and build number of VMware vSphere Update Manager that is running in a customer’s environment. I’ve written this post mainly as a reminder to myself, but hopefully it helps someone else down the track. VMware have a KB article for most of their products to correlate the build numbers with versions. The specific article for VUM is KB 2143837. Sometimes these aren’t always right up to date unfortunately. ...

I’ve always tried to use and recommend using the ’least privileges’ model when designing and implementing systems. But we’ve all been there, when the same service account is being used to connect everything to vCenter, and said account has been assigned the full administrator role and propagated within vCenter. I’m getting my lab set up again and I needed to install VMware Update Manager (VUM). I realised that in the lab previously I have just done as I mentioned before and used a high privilege service account thinking “it’s just a lab”. I thought this would be a good chance to check what privileges are actually required to install and register VUM with vCenter Server. I’ve quickly documented the steps below including the only privilege that is required. ...