Suppose you’re running VMware vSphere Foundation (VVF) or any vSphere configuration today outside of VMware’s flagship VMware Cloud Foundation, there are still options to help ease the pain of lifecycle management of your ESXi hosts.
You can learn more about Lifecycle Manager and what I cover in this blog by checking out Creating and Managing vSphere Lifecycle Manager Clusters
To give background on my home lab, the following is a 3-node vSAN cluster running Center 8.0.2 Build 23929136 (8.0U2c). I also have Aria Suite Lifecycle Manager and NSX 4.1.x integrated with vCenter. This cluster has already been converted to Image-Based, I’m simply performing the upgrade.
Click ‘Edit’ and you will find if there are any available ESXi versions you can go to.
I selected 8.0 U2c 23825572 and clicked ‘Save’. Wait for Cluster task to complete. Once completed your Image should no longer be complaint and details will be provided.
Before kicking off Remediation, click on the option menu next to ‘Check Compliance’ and select ‘Edit Remediation Settings’
We still have options such as Remediate All or Stage All, today I will perform ‘Remediate All’
Review the Impact Report and if there are any other settings you want to modify
From the ‘Update’ section of the Cluster object, you can review the status, so far esxi03 is in Maintenance Mode and rebooting.
Be sure to check for any VM / Host Affinity rules on the cluster.
The remediation completed, all hosts are back online and the Image is compliant with the new version.
As a bonus…my hosts contain TPM 2.0 chips and there were no issues with host attestation with vCenter.
