Yellow Bricks

by Duncan Epping

vum

VUM and MS SQL 2008 support

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I received multiple questions around this so decided to ask around internally. I managed to get ahold of the VMware Update Manager (aka VUM) Product Manager and after exchanging a couple of emails this is the outcome:

VMware vSphere Compatibility Matrixes
Table 13 on page 14 of the above linked document states that VUM doesn’t support MS SQL 2008 Standard. This is however untrue and should be considered as a document bug. It is supported and the document will be modified soon to reflect these changes.

32-bit ODBC DSN for VUM 4.1

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My VMware Cloud Team colleague Max Daneri of VMTS fame was building a vSphere 4.1 environment this week. During the installation of VUM(VMware Update Manager) he ran into an issue with the database connection which I thought would be useful to share with you. After some playing around he found out that apparently VUM requires a 32-bit ODBC DSN. Which was a surprise as VUM requires a 64-bit OS.

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.

VUM and downloading patches via PAC

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When I tried to download patches via a freshly installed VMware vSphere Update Manager today I received the following error:

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…

ESXi and the update manager part II

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A couple of days ago I posted about Update Manager wanting to install updates regarding the Nexus while I did not have the Nexus installed. I’ve rebuild my entire test environment with the latest(GA) build and noticed that I’m not experiencing these issues anymore. Now I’ve either had an outdated version of VUM, a screwed up database or I was sleeping when I wanted to apply the patches. Normally I take screenshots when things like this happen but because I did not have much time I did not take them.

I reinstalled my test environment again this morning and again I’m not able to reproduce it. The patch only installs when the Cisco Nexus 1000v is installed. It seems like my observation was wrong, I do however think it’s a smart thing not trust on technology for 100%, check your baseline before you apply it.