How should i configure update manager for best installation? (should i exclude older patches that i dont need to install?)

[babou]

I plan to upgrade my esx servers this weekend from 3.5u1 to 3.5u2. When i look in updatemanager i also see some updates from april and june which haven't installed earlier. I guess they are a part of update2 (?) so i dont need to install them before installing update2. Should i then exclude all older patches in my baseline and only install update2 and the other patches that is released with it? If I dont exclude them, I guess they will be installed before UM installes them again in update2?

Is there also a way to remove the older patches from my baselines? When i have upgraded all my servers to update2, then there's really no need for me to have all those older patches downloaded and visible.

[chill]

If you want to exclude certain patches you can edit the baseline and exclude certain patches. To do this, select Update Manager, select Baselines and select the baseline that you want to edit, then once the baseline window opens, go into exclusions and select the patches that you don't want installed.

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[Texiwill]

Hello,

I try not to exclude anything. Let the tool take care of doing that for you. If you are going to update to Update2, which I would not if you require VMware HA capability and only have 2-3 nodes, then the other patches most likely will not be installed an be marked as installed. I recently did the same thing and just let it go, it only installed Update 2 but marked all the others as being installed. This way things are nice and neat within VUM. I exclude only those things I really do not have installed I.e. samba.

Best regards,

Edward L. Haletky

VMware Communities User Moderator

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Author of the book 'VMWare ESX Server in the Enterprise: Planning and Securing Virtualization Servers', Copyright 2008 Pearson Education.

CIO Virtualization Blog: http://www.cio.com/blog/index/topic/168354

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