VMWare Update Manager Configuration Best Practices?

Judging by the number of posts recently, it is no surprise that I haven’t seen a lot of good documentation surrounding VMWare Update Manager. One thing I haven’t seen is a best practices on how to configure Update Manager. Here is a list of the options and some thoughts on setting for each one.

1. To access the configuration settings, Click the Update Manager Button
2. Click the Configuration Tab in Update Manager
3. Guest Settings -> By default this will take a snapshot of guests but not delete them. This can degrade performance. Consider not taking snapshots or have them autodelete after a certain number of hours (Max appears to be 100 hours)
4. ESX Host Settings -> By default the response of ESX hosts that can not enter maintenance mode is to retry every 30 minutes but the number of times is set for zero. That doesn’t make sense to me. Consider setting the value to 1 or 2 and setting the time as appropriate for your environment. In addition to retry as an action, you can also Fail Task, Power Off and Retry, or Suspend and Retry
5. Update Downloads -> Click Update Downloads in the upper right corner

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  • Under Select Update Types, check the boxes for the OS’s you will update. By default, Windows, Linux and ESX are all checked. If you are only going to update ESX servers, uncheck Windows and Linux. Click Next.
  • Under Schedule Task, enter the parameters for the scheduled download task and click Next
  • Under E-mail Notification, optionally enter the e-mail addresses to be notified when new updates are downloaded and click Next
  • Click Finish
  
  

You can also modify the Internet Settings if you have a proxy server and/or modify the ports Update Manager uses. I will assume this is self explanatory.