Lab 21 FINAL!

Lab 21

Finally I'm up to my final lab! It's taken many hours to get to this point, so I'm glad that I have finally arrived!

Right, this lab was all about using the vSphere Update Manager to update a host. 

First off, I needed to get the environment ready for the lab, so I enabled automatic DRS, and I checked that there were no reservations for any resources. Once that was all sorted out, I set up the vSphere Update Manager.

Automatic DRS enabled:

While setting up the update manager, the lab tells you to import a specific patch file. Since I have a different patch level ESXi host, and don't have that patch file, I decided to just download patches directly from the internet since I have internet access in my network. Actually, at first I just downloaded the patch definitions, downloading the actual patches will happen when required.

Downloaded patch definitions:

Next I created a baseline for the host, then I attached the baseline to the esxi02 host:

After scanning for updates you can see that the host does not comply with the baseline:

I then staged the patches:

What staging the patches does is it downloads the required updates through vSphere, then copies them onto the esxi host to be applied. I had some issues in this step because some patches didn't want to download. I ended up removing patches from the baseline until eventually the selected patches decided to stage.

Staging success!

The very last step to this lab was to remediate the host and hope that it patches successfully. It only needs to do two patches so it should run pretty smoothly.

Settings for remediation

ANNDDD nope. It failed. After many hours of fiddling with settings, even trying only one patch, It would always fail to an unknown error. Considering I tried my best and theoretically if the system was fine the update would have worked, I decided to leave it at that and conclude my blogs. 

Conclusion

Looking back at all the labs, I think I did pretty well. Apart from the final task, I pretty much got everything working, and I figured out some interesting fixes to get around my issues. I don't really like leaving things unfinished and I can generally solve most of my issues, but this last one is beyond me and I just can't be bothered spending hours and hours just to get one last thing going. 

As it probably shows, I'm not a huge fan of blogs, and I don't think I did mine that amazingly, but the way I think is very logical and straightforward. I'm not creative in an artsy sort of way, so I don't really spout about feelings and thoughts about stuff. I simply show what I did and how I got around issues that I encountered. Some workarounds are not explained in much detail because I feel that they are simple and don't need much explaining.

Otherwise, I'm pretty happy and I look forward to a relaxing holidays.