Welcome to my blog and thanks for checking it out.  As the title implies I’ll be stepping you through upgrading an existing vSphere 6.5 GA or above environment to vSphere 6.5 U1.  The process is incredibly simple depending on how many hosts you have it doesn’t take that much time at all.   This will be broken into three articles, one for the PSC upgrade, one for the vCenter upgrade and one to demonstrate using Update Manager to upgrade hosts.  If you haven’t upgraded to vSphere 6.5 yet check out my vSphere 6.5 Series.

ESXi Host Upgrade

In the previous article we stepped through upgrading the vCenter VCSA appliance.  It almost didn’t need to be a separate article since the steps are nearly identical to the PSC VCSA upgrade but since it is a different component I felt it was necessary.   Either way now that we have both management components upgraded it’s time to upgrade the ESXi hosts.  As of vSphere 6.5 GA, Update Manager is now available on the vCenter VCSA.  This is a pretty important step for VMware since they’ve stated that the next iteration of vSphere will not be deployable on Windows.  It will be VCSA only for the vCenter and PSC.  This is also an important step for customers wanting to migrate to the VCSA and rid themselves of the dependence on Windows.

This is the last step in upgrading our environment and arguably the most important.  It’s also typically the easiest part of the process.  We’ll use Update Manager to attach a baseline to each host.  We’ll scan each host for compliance against the baseline.  Finally, we’ll remediate each host, installing all the applicable patches, bugfixes and updates. Continue reading →