The vSphere Lifecycle Management (vLCM), a powerful feature designed to simplify and streamline the lifecycle management of your vSphere environments.

Whether you’re managing a single cluster or a large-scale data center, vLCM provides a centralized, automated approach to handle firmware, driver, and software updates across your entire infrastructure.

By integrating hardware and software management into a single workflow, vLCM ensures consistency, reduces operational overhead, and minimizes the risk of downtime.

In this post we will see step by step how to use vLCM to update and upgrade our ESXi hosts.

!!! Note !!!
If you upgrade hosts managed by vCenter Server, you must upgrade vCenter Server
before you upgrade the ESXi hosts. If you do not upgrade your environment in the correct order,
you can lose data and lose access to servers.

Source: https://docs.vmware.com/en/VMware-vSphere/8.0/vsphere-esxi-80-upgrade-guide.pdf


About upgrading the vCenter Server (VCSA) you can also read my following post.

How to update/upgrade vCenter Server (VCSA) by using the vCenter Server Appliance Management Interface (VAMI)


Table Of Contents
  1. Upgrading and Patching the ESXi Hosts by using vLCM
  2. Links


Upgrading and Patching the ESXi Hosts by using vLCM

Click on the main menu and select the Lifecycle Manager.


With vSphere 7.0, VMware launched a feature called vSphere Lifecycle Manager Images (vLCM), which uses a declarative model, to holistically define the desired state of the ESXi host image; including the target ESXi version, firmware & drivers.

This feature enables all the ESXi hosts, to adhere to the desired state; by enforcing consistency across the cluster. When a host drifts from the desired state, the host can be ‘remediated’ to become compliant to the desired state, once again. 

So below in this post I will use this new vSphere Lifecycle Manager Images (vLCM) feature to update and upgrade my ESXi hosts.

With the launch of vSphere 8.0, Broadcom is announcing the deprecation of vSphere Lifecycle Manager Baselines (previously known as vSphere Update Manager VUM).

The capability will continue to be supported, and will remain in the product, and is available for use in vSphere 8, until its removal in the next Major release of vSphere.  

Customers should transition from using vSphere Lifecycle Manager Baselines (VUM), to instead using vSphere Lifecycle Manager Images (vLCM) for managing the lifecycle of ESXi hosts.  

Source: https://knowledge.broadcom.com/external/article?legacyId=89519


Here we can see all available ESXi versions in the repository.


To upgrade/update our ESXi hosts, we need to navigate to Hosts and Clusters -> Updates -> Images as shown below. We can also see here that currently the cluster is running with the ESXi image version 7.0 U3sq – 23794019.


As mentioned to the beginning, when upgrading the ESXi hosts, we must upgrade vCenter Server
first at least to the version we want to upgrade the ESXi hosts. My vCenter Server I was already upgraded to the latest version as of today is 8.0.3.

About how to update and upgrade the vCenter Server you can also read my following post.

How to update/upgrade vCenter Server (VCSA) by using the vCenter Server Appliance Management Interface (VAMI)


In my case before I can upgrade and remediate the ESXi hosts to the latest version, I will first need to add the Flings USB NICs component drivers to the image.

For my lab environment I will use two notebooks for the ESXi hosts and they will use USB NICs which by default is not be supported for all models by the out-of-the box ESXi images.


Therefore I will first need to download the latest version from the new Broadcom Flings Site.


To import them we need to navigate to the Lifecycle Manager back, here from the Actions menu select Import Updates.


Now we need to select our downloaded Flings zip file.


Afterwards we will find the imported update under Components -> Independent components as shown below.


A quick check if this is really the *.vib I was importing, looks good!


The VMware USB NIC Fling Driver component is critical for my ESXi hosts because as mentioned they will use USB NICs which by default are not supported by the ESXi images.

More about you will find in my following post.

How to Create a Custom ESXi Boot ISO Image with VMware Flings USB Network Drivers injected



Back on the Cluster node we can now add this component to the latest ESXi image. Here we can click on Setup Image Manually.


Click on Edit.


Below I will first select the latest ESXi version and then I will click on Show details under Components in order to add my Flings USB NIC component drivers.


Click on Add Components.


Then I will select the previously added Flings USB NIC drivers.


Click on Save.


vCenter Server will then check the image compliance to see if all hosts in the cluster will run on this latest ESXi image.


Because my ESXi hosts currently are running version 7.0 U3sq they are of course out of compliance with the latest selected image version 8.0 U3d.


We can now click on Finish Image Setup above. Click on Yes, Finish Image Setup to switch to the new image update method instead of the deprecated baselines.


The compliance will be checked again.


We can now remediate all of the ESXi hosts to finally upgrade them to version 8.0. U3d.

!!! Note !!!
As shown on the next dialog, Hosts will be remediated one at a time. so hosts will not reboot/go into maintenance mode simultaneously.



Finally click on Start Remediation.


The remediation of the hosts will start …


Alternatively we can also remediate the hosts separately by clicking on the Actions menu below and selecting Remediate. Here just the selected host will be remediated.


Below I will remediate all 3 ESXi hosts. We can see the steps which will be performed currently, first my host ‘esxi-03.matrixpost-lab.net’ will be remediated.


So far installing the image on host ‘esxi-03.matrixpost-lab.net’ is completed and the host will be restarted.


Next the host ‘esxi-01.matrixpost-lab.net’ will be remediated.


Finally the last host ‘esxi-02.matrixpost-lab.net’ will be remediated.



Finally all three ESXi hosts completed the remediation with upgrading the hosts to ESXi vesion 8.0 U3d – 24585383 completed successfully.


In my case because of using USB NICs in my lab environment as the hosts running on Dell XPS notebooks, also the integration of the Flings USB NIC drivers works for the new image.



Links

How to Upgrade ESXi Host with Lifecycle Manager
https://vmcloud.pl/2023/03/13/how-to-upgrade-esxi-host-with-lifecycle-manager/

Introducing vSphere Lifecycle Management (vLCM)
https://www.vmware.com/docs/introducing-vsphere-lifecycle-management-vlcm