Update manager for remote location?

[chrisy]

Suppose there's a local ESX farm, with VirtualCenter and around 14 ESX servers, and UpdateManager's handling patches. If a remote datacenter is added with enough bandwidth to manage a couple of ESX servers but not enough to push large files around easily, what's the best approach for Update Manager?

Assume for discussion that there's only a couple of remote ESX servers, and no budget / plan for a remote instance of VC.

Is there anyone actually in this situation? I'd rather not give up on update manager; it doesn't seem so good for virtual machines but handles ESX nicely, at least for local servers.

--

Chris

[NotAvailable]

Hi Chris,

that's exactly the problem we are runnning into. (http://communities.vmware.com/thread/234593?tstart=0)

What is your solution so far?

Thanks!

[sflanders]

I have done this through a T1 connection and while the patching is slow, as long as the connection is not really needed for anything else it is possible. I have noticed when attempting this that in addition to taking a long time (because of the patch copying) I typically have to remediate a second time as Update Manager will time out. Another note is that if you using monitoring (say Nagios) in the primary DC to check on the remote site, you will want to disable notifications to the remote site as Update Manage will hog all the bandwidth. Due to these factors, I schedule updates during the night or over the weekend.