How to skip hosts during the ESXI update

Products

• VMware Cloud Foundation

Issue/Introduction

You can skip hosts while applying an ESXi update to the management domain or a VI workload domain. The skipped hosts are not updated.

Please be aware that this will not work for hosts that are part of a VI workload domain which is using vSphere Lifecycle Manager Images, because these hosts are updated on cluster level rather than host level.

Environment

• VMware Cloud Foundation 4.x
• VMware Cloud Foundation 5.x

Resolution

1. Note : Please take a snapshot of the sddc manager beforehand.

   1. Login to SSH of the SDDC manager using the vcf user.
   2. Type su to switch to the root account.
   3. Retrieve the host IDs for the hosts you want to skip:

      # curl 'https://SDDC_MANAGER_IP/v1/hosts' -i -u 'username:password' -X GET -H 'Accept: application/json' | json_pp

   4. Copy the ids for the hosts you want to skip from the output. For example:

      ...
               "fqdn" : "<host_fqdn>",
               "esxiVersion" : "8.0-24585383",
               "id" : "##################",
      ...

   5. Open the /opt/vmware/vcf/lcm/lcm-app/conf/application-prod.properties file:

      # vi /opt/vmware/vcf/lcm/lcm-app/conf/application-prod.properties

   6. At the end of the file, add the following line:

      esx.upgrade.skip.host.ids=hostid1,hostid2

   7. Replace hostid1, hostid2 etc. against the IDs copied in step 4.
   8. Save and close the file:

      :wq

   9. Ensure that the ownership of the application-prod.properties file is vcf_lcm:vcf
   10. Restart the services of the SDDC manager:

       # opt/vmware/vcf/operationsmanager/scripts/cli/sddcmanager_restart_services.sh

Additional Information

The hosts added to the application-prod.properties are not updated when you update the workload domain.