So I've got a bevy of ESXi Embedded systems connected to my VirtualCenter server, and I want to use Update Manager to patch them up to current. I've got them attached to the "critical" and "non-critical" baselines. When I try to scan them, the scan fails with:

Failed to scan HOSTNAME for updates.

Patch metadata for HOSTNAME missing. Please download updates metadata first.

Now, I'm no dummy. I've read the forums, I've seen the thread and KB article about multiple NICs in my VirtualCenter server, and I edited that vci-integrity.xml file, or whatever it was, to have the URL of the Virtual Center server. And I confirmed that the ESXi host in question could both ping and resolve the virtualcenter server. The VirtualCenter server has unfettered access to the outside, and so has no problem talking to vmware.com or whatever that other site was that was listed in the KB articles. There's another KB article that mentions opening up firewall ports on the "ESX host", but that doesn't seem to be an option with the ESXi host, at least not anywhere that I've seen.

Support tells me that there's only two ways to manage the updates on ESXi embedded systems, using the "VMware Infrastructure Update" application (which requires manually logging into each and every ESXi host), or using some command-line tool. This, frankly, seems insane to me considering the Update Manager seems to be orders of magnitude more powerful in terms of what it can do, and I can't picture ESXi users being forced to do things "the very hard way" like that.

Does anyone have experience with this they'd like to share? I'm beginning to get very frustrated....

Cheers,

Derek