Lifecycle Manager - vSphere Video Tutorial | LinkedIn Learning, formerly Lynda.com (2024)

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- [Narrator] In this video, we'll learn about "vSphere Lifecycle Manager". Now vSphere Lifecycle Manager is essentially the next generation of Update Manager. So if you're familiar with Update Manager, a lot of the concepts for lifecycle manager are not going to be new to you. We used Update Manager to do things like upgrade and patch our ESXi hosts to install VIBs on ESXi hosts as well. And VIBs are just additional third party software bundles. So if we want to install some kind of third party software on an ESXi host, that's distributed as a VIB and we can use Update Manager to add extensions to ESXi hosts, those are VIBs. We can also use Update Manager to update the virtual machine hardware and VMware tools on virtual machines. That's really about it. We can't do much more than that with Update Manager. So how is life cycle manager different? So with lifecycle manager we get all of the functions of Update Manager plus we get image consistency. So what we essentially want to do here is establish a base image, base version of ESXi itself. That's going to be our base image. And that's the main part of what makes an ESXi host an ESXi host base image. Then we've got other components like third-party software packages that need to be installed on ESXi. We used to call these VIBs, we're calling them components now. And then we have things like the desired state for the firmware, the desired driver versions. And what we want to do is utilize lifecycle manager to maintain a consistent image across all of my ESXi hosts. So I can have this declarative lifecycle model where basically I choose the desired image for cluster of ESXi hosts. We choose the require drivers, the required vendor add-ons, the required firmware. And this is the state that we want our hosts to be in. So all hosts are kept in this state and any hosts that drift outside of that state are remediated. Now in order to make this work properly, all the hosts need to be from the same vendor and ideally the same model. And NSX is not currently supported in this first release. Although I imagine it'll be supported at some time in the future. All right. So let's take a look at life cycle manager in the vSphere Client. So here I am at the home screen of the vSphere Client and I'm just going to click on lifecycle manager. So here we are at the home screen for a lifecycle manager and it brings us right away to our image depot. And this is where we can store stuff like a base ESXi images vendor add-ons and third party components. So these are the things that are going to make up my ESXi image, and I can click on actions here and I can potentially import updates. So if I choose to import updates, I could import a zip file. And what that zip file is an ESXi offline bundle. So for example, here we are at my vmware.com and I know this is version 6.7U3 but just ignore the version for a moment. You can see here there's different download media for ESXi. We can download the ISO image or we can download an offline bundle that's in a zipped format. So if I want to download that offline bundle here then I can manually import it to the image depot but I'm not going to do that. What I'm going to do instead is cancel this and I've already gone to actions and I've gone to sync updates. And what that did is it actually synchronized updates over my internet connection. So there's a couple of different ways I have available to get software added to this image depot. So now you can see that in my image depot, all of these software components have been successfully downloaded. You can see here's an ESXi version 7.0GA and a build number here. And if we scroll down a little bit more, we can see some of our vendor software components, things like DellEMC add-on for PowerEdge Services and HPE customization for HPE Servers. And then we've got some components listed down here as well. So now I've got all this stuff available here in my image depot, I'm going to go to hosts and clusters. And you can see here, I've created a cluster. I'm just going to quickly drag one of my hosts into that cluster. So there's actually a host in there to work with. And on this cluster, I'm in the updates tab and we have the option here to manage this cluster with a single image. So let's click on that button because this is something new with vSphere Lifecycle Manager. You can see here, we have the ability now to make sure that all the hosts in my cluster get the same image, and there's some prerequisites here. And in my environment, all of my hosts are ESXi 7.0 or later, they must be from the same vendor. Well, this is my home lab environment. So my hosts are actually virtual machines. So no problem there, but ideally if you're using this your hosts should be from the same vendor and optimally they should be the same model as well. And then finally hosts may not be stateless. So if you've created stateless hosts using auto deploy that's not a fit for this. So let's set up an image here. I'm going to click on setup image. Now I'll choose the ESXi version that I want to use for this image. And then I'll choose any vendor add-ons or any firmware and driver add-ons that I want to include here. So if I click on vendor add-on, there's some here for Dell and HPE. These aren't really Dell hosts but I'm going to go ahead and just for demonstration purposes, add this vendor add-on. And then additional components here. We can add components if we have them available. So you can see here there's a number of components that were available from that synchronization that I just did. I'm just going to grab one of them. I'm going to grab the VMware USB NIC Fling driver and I'm going to go ahead and select that. So that must be a fling that's been released by VMware. So I'm just going to add that component on as well. And then I'll scroll down here and I'm just going to click on validate and my validate image task is complete. So I'm going to go ahead and click save here. And so now what I've basically done is establish an image comprised of the actual ESXi base image as well as some additional components as well. And what it's now doing is it's checking image compliance across my cluster to determine which ESXi hosts in the cluster have an image that is in compliance with this and which ones do not. So now we can see the results of the compliance check and we can see that both of my ESXi hosts are out of compliance with the image. So they are only showing the drift comparison here. Let's look the full image comparison. And you can see here from a compliance perspective the ESXi version, that's actually compliant. That's the version that I already have on my ESXi hosts. So if I show only drift comparison it's only going to show the things that these ESXi hosts need in order to be compatible with the image that I just created. So I'm just going to click on finish image setup and it's basically telling me, "Hey, this is a baseline. That's going to be attached to the cluster." And once you've done this the cluster can not go back to using baselines. I can change the image at any point later but this is going to replace all the baselines attached to this cluster. And so now that that's finished we're ready to remediate. So you can see here now the host in this cluster are managed collectively. They've got this image, that's going to be applied to all of the hosts in the cluster. And then if we scroll down a little bit we can see under the image compliance screen we have the ability to remediate all. And we can also run a pre-check. So the remediate option is similar to remediating with Update Manager, using a baseline. This gives us the option to remediate individual hosts or to remediate all of the hosts at once. So I'm just going to go ahead and click on remediate all. And now we're getting this remediation impact report giving us an overview of the impact that the remediation will have and a more detailed impact for individual ESXi hosts as well. So we should check this over and agree to our licensing requirements. Let's take a look here. Two hosts are noncompliant with the image. Two hosts will be rebooted, and we can see here the impact. Two specific hosts, where we have running VMs that'll get migrated, they'll enter maintenance mode we'll get the image and they'll get rebooted. So I'm fine with this. I'm going to accept the terms of the end user license agreement and I'm going to click on start remediation. And what it's now doing is pushing out this image along with these additional components here to these two ESXi hosts. So this part is going to take awhile because all of the hosts are going to have to be placed in maintenance mode and rebooted. So I'm just going to pause my recording while the remediation happens. So the remediation process is still occurring but I just wanted to show you here. You can see it started rebooting my first host. And so it must have finished remediating that host. And now it's actually going through the process of placing that host and maintenance mode and rebooting it. And I can actually skip remaining hosts here if I wanted to, but it's still going. So now it's going to move on to the next host and much like Update Manager that's the way that this works. It's going to remediate one host at a time and just kind of roll through a rolling upgrade of all of these ESXi hosts. So now you can see my remediation is still in process. One host is now completed. There's still one host remaining, and I'm reasonably sure that the second host is going to fail and I just wanted to mention the reason why. On the second host, there's a DNS configuration issue. So when this host reboots, it's actually going to revert to some incorrect DNS settings that are configured. And because of that the host will not be able to be scanned for compliance. And that's one of the things that happens when you do a remediate all is not only does it actually install the necessary software, but when it's done it performs a compliance check of each and every host to validate that they are now compliant with the image. And here you can see the remediation processes completed but the remediation of that second host failed. So one host is completed, one host failed because it was unable to scan afterwards to determine if that ESXi host was actually compliant with the image now. So yeah, I still have one host that's out of compliance with the image but I've got another ESXi host that is in compliance with the image. And so this one's in good shape. And here you can see if we click on the host itself and we go to image, we can see our green check here. We're in compliance with this image. There is no drift. Everything is up to date there. If we go to the second host, we can see here that this host is now out of compliance with the image. It doesn't have some of the software components on it that we need to add for it to be in compliance with that image. Now, as our final step I want to show you how to actually export an image. So you have the ability to export your image in a variety of different formats, either in a JSN, formatted text as an ISO image or as a zip file. So here's my image. I can click on this little link here and I can export this image. The JSON image is going to be able to be imported into other clusters that are managed by images but the JSON tax file is a really simple text file that only has metadata about your image. So it doesn't actually have the image components included within it. An ISO image, exports this image as an image that can be installed on an ESXi host. So I can take this, I can import it into other clusters or I can just manually build an ESXi host with this ISO image. And then finally, I can use a zip file as an offline bundle. So I could use this offline bundle to import these components into a different vCenter server. So I'm just going to export this image as a JSON text file 'cause that'll be really small and we can quickly take a look at it. And yeah, here you can see the specifics in that JSON text file. It's just telling it, hey, what version of ESXi should be part of this image? What additional components should be installed and anything else that's part of my image will be included in that JSON text file. And then finally, one last thing I want to show you before we leave lifecycle manager here. We can also check our hosts against the hardware compatibility list. And so this gives me the ability to check this cluster and see if the hardware within it is compatible with vSAN. So that is lifecycle manager. And again, there's other things we can do in lifecycle manager, like upgrade VMware tools on virtual machines or upgrade the VM hardware version on virtual machines on our ESXi hosts. Those things are very similar to what we've done with Update Manager in the past. But this is new being able to assign an image to a cluster of ESXi hosts and monitor those ESXi hosts for the appropriate image, including vendor add-ons firmware and driver add-ons and components. So that's a new feature of vSphere 7.0 that should make the management of ESXi hosts easier.