In this video, we walk through the end-to-end process of updating vCenter and patching ESXi hosts using vSphere Lifecycle Manager. You’ll learn how to generate and apply a Broadcom download token, update the vCenter depot, upgrade vCenter Server, and then use Lifecycle Manager images to remediate ESXi hosts in a cluster Broadcom VMware. Broadcom Security Advisory 25390
In this video, we'll be covering vSphere Lifecycle Manager. Go ahead and generate a token, apply the token to vCenter, update vCenter, and then use Lifecycle Manager to patch each of the ESXi hosts in the cluster. First, we need to log into the Broadcom portal. Enter our username here. And password. And from the landing page, we can simply scroll down.
On the right-hand side, we have a link, Generate Download Token. From the dropdown, select our site ID. Click the Generate Token button. Since we have the browser open, gonna head over to this Broadcom KB. Scroll down, and we're gonna grab the VMware Depot Change.zip.
Now, this contains PowerShell scripts that we can use to update our vCenter with the token that we generated. Next, we'll open up PowerShell seven and run this command to install PowerCLI if we don't have it already. Once we have PowerCLI installed, we can then run the PowerShell script we downloaded from the Broadcom site. Option two to enter our t-token. Proceed through the prompts. And we'll use option four to update our vCenter Depot.
Next up, we'll go back to our browser, open up our vSphere client, and we're gonna navigate to the vCenter virtual machine. We need to make sure the vCenter version is greater than our ESXi version that we're gonna patch to, so we're gonna perform a vCenter update first. Before we do that, be sure to take a virtual machine snapshot in case anything goes wrong, we can roll it back. The snapshot in place, we can log into the management interface. This is our vCenter FQDN colon fifty-four eighty. Go to the Updates tab and find available updates here. Gonna choose the update to apply.
Click Stage and Install. It does give us some warnings, but none of these are going to block the upgrade, so we will continue. And this upgrade can take quite some time to complete. Upgrade completed. So with that, we can go back to the vSphere client, and we'll get into Lifecycle Manager from the menu. We're going to sync updates from the Actions menu. Now, this can happen automatically if you wait long enough, but we're just gonna kick it off straight away. So we'll go back to the inventory, locate our cluster, Updates tab. We're gonna set up the image. In this case, it's already created, so I'm gonna click on Edit.
I can choose the updated ESXi version. Under Vendor Add-On, look for the Dell Add-On PowerEdge Servers version eight. Select it, and we'll save the image. After a check for compliance, we can see that our hosts are no longer matching the software in the image. And so we could select one of our hosts from the Actions menu on the middle right, Remediate, and this will go proceed to patch that host. And again, updates can take some time to complete. Once the host upgrade is complete, we'll find it's no longer shown in the list because it is already compliant.
We can then proceed to patch the remaining hosts all at once with Remediate All. And according to our settings, this will proceed to patch each, each of the hosts one at a time by putting them in a maintenance mode and proceeding through. Remediation complete. There's no longer any host shown that do not match the compliance check. And so we'll just go over to Skyline Health from the Monitor tab and make sure that our cluster is healthy. After a retest of Skyline Health, we can see that the cluster is now healthy. Thanks for watching.
