While I was playing around I decided to do things in an incorrect order to see if I could break it, and of course I did manage to break it… I managed to fix all of it though. The first thing I did was testing the rule set and repairing it as documented below.

Now if you run into any issues you can repair the ruleset by using the following command:

Get-VMHost <esxi host> | Test-DeployRuleSetCompliance | Repair-DeployRuleSetCompliance

Now if your host boots and mentions that there’s no rule associated you might want to try the following:

Get-DeployRule

If your newly created rule is returned you will want to make sure it is active:

Get-DeployRuleSet

If there’s nothing listed it means no rules are currently active (active ruleset is what the documentation will refer to). You you can set the rule as active as follows:

Set-DeployRuleSet -DeployRule <name of rule>

Everyone who is considering using Auto-Deploy I would most definitely recommend to explore these commands and to try to break things and fix it. Document your steps along the way, I am certain it will be valuable at some point!

• Build a new 64-bit vCenter Server
• Download the vCenter zip or ISO
• Go to the “datamigration” folder and copy/extract the datamigration.zip.
• Copy the extracted content to your “source” vCenter Server
• Stop the vCenter Service, Update Management Service and the vCenter Web Service
• Run  “backup.bat” under the datamigration folder from a Command Prompt
  • One decision that you need to make is if you want to backup all Host patches as well, I prefer to just download them again
• When the process has completed copy the full “datamigration” folder to your new vCenter server
• Run  “install.bat” under the datamigration folder from a Command Prompt
  • It will display the name of the vCenter Server you are about to “restore”, validate it and type Y
  • Provide the path to the vCenter install files
  • Provide the path to the VUM install files (probably same as previous step)
  • Now just follow the normal installation process
  • You will see an installer popping up, note that in the Command Prompt window the databases will be restored etc.
  • Takes roughly 15 minutes depending on the amount of data
• Start the vSphere Client… done,

Is that simple or what? I was kind of amazed by this to be honest, very simple and effective tool to migrate to a new 64-bit vCenter Server while keeping your Events, Tasks, Resource Pools etc… it is all there. Use it to your advantage,

Of course we should have read the documentation first as it is stated on page 27 of the VUM Install Guide…

IMPORTANT: Although you can install the Update Manager server only on 64-bit machines, Update Manager is a 32-bit application and requires a 32-bit DSN.

Site Recovery Manager 4.0.1
File size: 104 MB

You can find the download here. This patch fixes the following issues:

• Test recovery times have been improved for ESX 4.0.1 hosts that use iSCSI arrays.
• a problem that could cause a recovery plan to hang while powering-off virtual machines at the protected site if the virtual machine’s storage goes offline while the plan is running
• Customization is now supported for virtual machines running Windows 7 and Windows 2008 R2.
• a problem that could prevent IP customization from updating the /etc/hosts file on a protected virtual machine running Linux
• a problem that could cause intermittent site disconnections when there was a firewall between the sites that was configured to close connections due to inactivity
• a problem that could cause test and recovery networks to be swapped in a recovery plan after the SRM service was restarted
• a problem that could cause datastore group calculation to fail with a “Not initialized” exception when encountering a virtual machine with an RDM device for which the lunUuid is not set
• a problem that could cause a recovered virtual machine to be deleted if an administrator manually removed it from a protection group while a recovery plan was being run
• a problem that could cause the SRM Installer to fail to update vCenter credentials when running in Repair mode
• a problem that caused the Perl installation created by SRM to be incompatible with some Perl packages. This fix eliminates the need to create the temporary Perl installation mentioned in VMware Knowledge Base article 1014232.
• a problem that could cause the SRM Service to hang when a Configure All operation configured more than 300 virtual machines
• a problem that could cause recovery plan failures with hardware iSCSI HBAs connected to Clarriion arrays

This patch resolves the following issues :

• After upgrading Cisco Nexus 1000V VSM to the latest version, you might not be able to patch the kernel of ESX hosts attached to the vDS (KB 1015717)Upgrading Cisco Nexus 1000V VSM to the latest version upgrades the Cisco Virtual Ethernet Module (VEM) on ESX hosts attached to the vDS. Subsequently, from the same vSphere Client instance, you might not be able to use a host patch baseline to apply patches to the ESX vmkernel64 or ESXi firmware of hosts attached to the vDS. Applying patches to ESX vmkernel64 or ESXi firmware requires that you include the compatible Cisco Nexus 1000V VEM patch in the baseline. However, this patch might not be available for selection in the Update Manager New Baseline wizard or in the Update Manager patch repository.
• Upgrade of Cisco Nexus 1000V version 4.0(4)SV1(1) to version 4.0(4)SV1(2) with Update Manager might fail for hosts with certain patch levels (KB 1017069)If you are using Cisco Nexus 1000V version 4.0(4)SV1(1), and the ESX patch bulletins ESX400-200912401-BG or ESXi400-200912401-BG are installed on the host, you might not be able to upgrade to Cisco Nexus 1000V version 4.0(4)SV1(2).
• Scanning of hosts in a cluster and staging of patches to hosts in a cluster might take a long time to finishThe scanning and staging operations of hosts in a cluster run sequentially. If a cluster contains a lot of hosts, scanning and staging patches might take a long time to be completed. Scanning and staging of hosts in a cluster run concurrently on all of the selected hosts in the cluster.

For details regarding these new fixes, please refer to the release notes.

VMware vCenter Update Manager 4.0 Update 1 Patch 1 is available for download.

VMware vCenter Update Manager 4.0 Update 1 is required for installation of this patch.

View Manager Version 4.0.1 | 18 February 2010 | Build: 233023 (View Manager), 210930 (View Composer)

What’s New:

VMware View 4.0.1 is a maintenance release that resolves some known issues in the previous releases. For details, see the Resolved Issues section.

This release includes the following new features.
Localization of VMware View

The View Client and online help for View Client are now available in Japanese, French, German, and simplified Chinese. The View Manager Administration Guide, View Manager Release Notes, Getting Started with VMware View document, View Upgrade Guide, and View Architecture Planning Guide are also available in these languages.
VirtualCenter 2.5 Update 6 and ESX 3.5 Update 5 Support

View Manager 4.0.1 includes support for VirtualCenter 2.5 Update 6 and ESX 3.5 Update 5.
Enhancements to the PCoIP Display Protocol

PCoIP now supports the following features:

• Virtual Printing, which allows end users to use local or network printers from a View desktop without requiring that additional print drivers be installed in the View desktop.
• Single sign-on support for third party providers such as Sentillion and Imprivata.
• View Client supports international keyboards when using PCoIP.

For PCoIP-related bug fixes, see the View Client Resolved Issues section.

Of course multiple issues have been fixed in the maintenance release. For more details read here.

https://hostupdate.vmware.com/software/VUM/PRODUCTION/index.xml;
hosting the patch definitions and patches cannot be reached or has no patch data

Although we configured a proxy including the appropriate account it would not work. As suggested in this KB article I removed the “http://” part of the proxy address but still it bailed out with the error above. After trying several combinations I noticed that the proxy was actually a PAC address instead of a proxy server. A PAC basically serves a list which contains the proxy details of the environment. This comes in handy when you’ve got multiple proxy for redundancy… In this case VMware Update Manager wasn’t fond of the PAC file. When I used the address of the proxy server instead of the host server the PAC file it worked like a charm…

ESX:

• KB 1016291
• KB 1016292
• KB 1016293
• KB 1016294

ESXi:

• KB 1016295
• KB 1016296

We’ve released a new version of ESX 4.0 Update 1 that resolves the issue with the ESX 4.0 Update 1 install failing, timing out and resulting in the host entering an usable state.

The new version is called ESX 4.0 Update 1A.

You can find the new version on VMware Downloads.

For more details, see Due to a possible dead lock on rpmpd, upgrading ESX 4.0 to ESX 4.0 Update 1 can fail or time out and leave the host in an unusable state (1016070).

What’s New?

Notes:

1. Not all combinations of VirtualCenter and ESX Server versions are supported. All of these highlighted features are available only if you are using VirtualCenter 2.5 Update 5 with ESX Server 3.5 Update 5. See the ESX Server, VirtualCenter, and VMware Infrastructure Client Compatibility Matrixes for more information on compatibility.
2. VMware recommends VMware Tools upgrade for this version of ESX Server.

The following information provides highlights of some of the enhancements available in this release of VMware ESX Server:

Enablement of Intel Xeon Processor 3400 Series – Support for the Intel Xeon processor 3400 series has been added. Support includes Enhanced VMotion capabilities. For additional information on previous processor families supported by Enhanced VMotion, see Enhanced VMotion Compatibility (EVC) processor support (KB 1003212).

Driver Update for Broadcom bnx2 Network Controller – The driver for bnx2 controllers has been upgraded to version 1.6.9. This driver supports bootcode upgrade on bnx2 chipsets and requires bmapilnx and lnxfwnx2 tools upgrade from Broadcom. This driver also adds support for Network Controller – Sideband Interface (NC-SI) for SOL (serial over LAN) applicable to Broadcom NetXtreme 5709 and 5716 chipsets.

Driver Update for LSI SCSI and SAS Controllers – The driver for LSI SCSI and SAS controllers is updated to version 2.06.74. This version of the driver is required to provide a better support for shared SAS environments.

Newly Supported Guest Operating Systems – Support for the following guest operating systems has been added specifically for this release:

For more complete information about supported guests included in this release, see the VMware Compatibility Guide: http://www.vmware.com/resources/compatibility/search.php?deviceCategory=software.

• Windows 7 Enterprise (32-bit and 64-bit)
• Windows 7 Ultimate (32-bit and 64-bit)
• Windows 7 Professional (32-bit and 64-bit)
• Windows 7 Home Premium (32-bit and 64-bit)
• Windows 2008 R2 Standard Edition (64-bit)
• Windows 2008 R2 Enterprise Edition (64-bit)
• Windows 2008 R2 Datacenter Edition (64-bit)
• Windows 2008 R2 Web Server (64-bit)
• Ubuntu Desktop 9.04 (32-bit and 64-bit)
• Ubuntu Server 9.04 (32-bit and 64-bit)

Newly Supported Management Agents – See VMware ESX Server Supported Hardware Lifecycle Management Agents for current information on supported management agents.