vCenter LifeCycle Management - Update remote ESXi Host is possible and safe ?

[GlobalVisionIT]

Hi all !

I'm new in LifeCycle Management and I want to know if it's safe to manage upgrade of a remote ESXi host from my local vCenter Server.

My vCenter Server is in my local network in my head office and it controls all my remote ESXi hosts.

I have several ESXi 6,7 and 7.x Hosts in my remote branches that I connected via internet (VPN or port forward on branches's firewalls)

Now I want to upgrade from 6.7 to 7.0.3 and from 7.0.x to 7.0.3 all my remote hosts using LifeCycle Manager of my local vCenter Server, without go locally in each branches

Is it safe to do it. Will LifeCycle manager send the configured image (about 450 MB) to each host using internet connection to upgrade them ? Or it make the host to download locally itself from vmware server ?

Many thanks for you suggestions

Kind regards to all you

[irigoyen]

I just had a similar issue. I had to upgrade some ESXi 6.7 Hosts to version 7.0.3 in Asia from my Office in Central Europe. The VPN connection was bad and unstable.

• From VMware Site I downloaded the latest Offline bundle ZIP file
• I copied the ZIP file to a local datastore on the destination Hosts.
• I placed the host in maintenance mode.
• Through SSH I executed this esxcli command:
  • Esxcli software sources profile list -d /vmfs/volumes/<datastore path>/VMware-ESXi-<version>-depot.zip
  • Esxcli software profile update -p <ESX profile name> -d /vmfs/volumes/<datastore path>/VMware-ESXi-<version>-depot.zip

I know that I didn’t answer your real question. But in my scenario, due the bad connection, I preferred to pre-stage the Host with the ZIP file, and then do the real upgrade.

[GlobalVisionIT]

Thanks for the reply.

My main purpose is to monitor all Hosts from one place. How can I connect all remote hosts to my local vcenter server?

They are all behind router and firewall and I don't have any vpn or dedicated public ip but I can do a port forwar