Update ESXi 5.5 hosts automatically

[jeffo6199]

I have ESXi 5.5 hosts that I would like to update with update manager using the schedule feature.  The issue I have is that we have appliances that run on every host (Trend & Zerto) that are not able to migrate.  The only options with update manager are to either migrate all the vms or power all of them off.  Does anyone know of a solution that we can patch\update our hosts with vms that cannot migrate without shutting off all the other vms on the hosts?

[BenLiebowitz]

There is no way to patch a host with running VMs on it, so if those VMs can't vMotion then you'll need to power them off and migrate them. 

As for automatically updating, you could modify the script i posted on my blog here and schedule the patching... and once the hosts that do not have VMs that can't migrate are done, you can manually migrate them off, and then patch the remaining hosts.  That's what I do when I need to patch my environment as we have VMs with RDMs that cannot vMotion.

http://www.thelowercasew.com/patching-vmware-esxi-hosts-via-powercli

Hope this helps.