Add HP or Dell drivers to VMware Update Manager (VUM)

HP has created a vSphere Installation Bundle (VIB) depot for all sort of important HP driver bundles for VMware vSphere 5 and higher. The VIP depot contains:

    • HP ESXi 5.0 Management Providers bundle – includes the latest HP Common Information Model (CIM) Providers, HP Integrated Lights-Out (iLO) driver, HP Compaq ROM Utility (CRU) driver, and the new HP Agentless Management Service (AMS).
    • HP ESXi 5.0 Utilities bundle – ESXCLI utilities such as HPBOOTCFG (boot order configuration),HPONCFG (remote iLO configuration) and HPACUCLI (Smart Array reporting and configuration)
    • HP ESXi 5.0 NMI bundle – Non Maskable Interrupt (NMI) driver used to write VMware® errors to the Insight Management Log (IML)
    • HP Agentless Management Service Offline Bundle – a service that provides support for Agentless Management and Active Health. Agentless Management Service provides a wider range of server information (e.g. OS type and version, installed applications, IP addresses) allowing customers to complement hardware management with OS information and alerting. Agentless Management provides Integrated Lights Out (iLO) based robust management without the complexity of OS-based agents. Active Health provides 24×7 mission control for servers, delivering maximum uptime through automated monitoring, diagnostics and alerting.
    • Device Drivers as used in the HP Customized VMware images
    • Latest ProLiant Server and option firmware and driver version recipe

The VIB depot can be used by the following tools:

  • VMware Update Manager (VUM)
  • ESXCLI
  • ImageBuilder

With the HP VIB depot integration for example in VUM there is no need to download and install the bundles manually. In this blog post I explain how to add the HP VIB depot to VMware Update Manager (VUM) by using the following steps:

Add the VIB Depot to VUM

  • Open the vCenter Client
  • Select under Solution and Application in the main screen of the vCenter client – Update Manager
  • Select configuration
  • In the Download sources select – Add Download Source
  • In Source URL use:
    • For HP Updates: http://vibsdepot.hpe.com/index.xml
    • For Dell Updates: http://vmwaredepot.dell.com/index.xml
  • Press OK
  • Select – Download Now to update the baseline

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Create a new Baseline

  • Select the Baselines and Groups tab
  • Create
  • Baseline Name  – HP Updates
  • Baseline Type – Host Extension
  • Extensions to Add – Select the extensions you need. In this example I selected the following extensions:
    • hpnmi for ESXi 5.0 v1.3
    • HP ESXi 5.0 Complete Bundle Update 1.3
    • HP ESXi 5.0 Management Bundle 1.2-26
    • HP Utility Bundle ESXi 5.0 v 1.2

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  • Finish

Attach the baseline and remediate

  • Attach the baseline to the cluster

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  • Select the baseline and scan for patches and extensions
  • The HP bundles that are missing are listed

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  • Use Remediate to install the HP bundles

When the hosts are rebooted and the remediation is finished, the Host Compliance overview is 100%.

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Using the  HP VIB depot is great way of keep your HP server up-to-date with the latest HP bundles.

More information can be found HP VIB bundle site found here.

Update July 20 2012 : Viktor van den Berg tested the above configuration and found out that this only works with new  installations. For existing installation you need to create an additional Host Patch Baseline. Viktor explains this on his cool blog found here here.

Ways to patch your VMware ESX(i) hosts

 

There are different ways to patch your VMware ESX(i) 4 hosts. The most common utilities are VMware Update Manager (VUM), vSphere Host Update Utility and the esxupdate command line utility (run from the Service Console) to patch your VMware environment. Here’s explained the differences between them.

VUM can be used to automated patch your complete environment without user intervention. ESX(i) host are automatically placed in maintenance mode and VM’s are migrated to other VMware ESX(i) host using VMotion and DRS techniques, the host is patched, rebooted and exiting maintenance mode.  VUM is used on enterprise environments.

vSphere Host Update Utility can be used to patch only VMware ESXi (not ESX) hosts. Normally this utility is used in small ESXi environments without VUM, VMotion and DRS.

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VUM utility vSphere Host Update Utility

ESXupdate command, this command line utility (in the service console) can be used to patch your standalone VMware ESX host, for example the vSphere Essentials edition. This small business version comes with for example VMware ESX, vCenter and VMware Update Manager. But when your vCenter server is installed virtually as VM you are not able to transfer the VM to another host because there is no VMotion in the license. All the VMs must be shutdown including the vCenter VM to put the host in maintenance mode. So you can’t use VMware Update Manager. Now you need the esxupdate command.  Here are the steps for using the ESXupdate command:

  • The first thing is to download the patch bundles. A bundle contains a metadata zip which defines the bulletins available for installation. This is a great improvement to earlier versions of VMware ESX. It’s possible to select all patch bundles and download them at once. The patch bundles can be found here.

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  • Upload the patch bundles on the VMware ESX VMFS  or NFS partition (other options such as HTTP repository are also possible). This can be done by using the datastore browser in the vCenter client.

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  • Shutdown all VMs on the VMware ESX host to patch using the .vSphere client or the vmware-cmd command.
  • Put the host in maintenance mode using the vSphere client or the following command:

vimsh -n -e /hostsvc/maintenance_mode_enter

  • Check the integrity of the patch bundle with the esxupdate –check –bundle command. Do this for all patch bundles.
  • Install the patch using the esxupdate update –bundle command. Install all patch bundles beginning with the oldest patch bundle.
  • Exit maintenance mode by using the vSphere client of the following command:
vimsh -n -e /hostsvc/maintenance_mode_exit
  • Reboot the hosts vSphere client of the following command:

shutdown –r now

Here’s a sample script:

vimsh -n -e /hostsvc/maintenance_mode_enter
esxupdate check --bundle ESX400-200906001.zip
esxupdate update --bundle ESX400-200906001.zip
esxupdate check --bundle ESX400-200907001.zip
esxupdate update --bundle ESX400-200907001.zip
esxupdate check --bundle ESX400-200909001.zip
esxupdate update --bundle ESX400-200909001.zip
esxupdate check --bundle ESX-4.0.0-update01a.zip
esxupdate update --bundle ESX-4.0.0-update01a.zip
esxupdate check --bundle ESX400-200912001.zip
esxupdate update --bundle ESX400-200912001.zip
esxupdate check --bundle ESX400-201002001.zip
esxupdate update --bundle ESX400-201002001.zip
vimsh -n -e /hostsvc/maintenance_mode_exit
shutdown -r now

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