Requirements for Enabling the vSphere Lifecycle Manager Live Patching Function to Patch for ESXi Hosts

Products

• VMware vCenter Server
• VMware vSphere ESX 8.x

Issue/Introduction

The Live Patch feature can activated on ESXi hosts in a cluster that is managed by a vSphere Lifecycle Manager image to apply security patches and urgent bug fixes. This feature causes very minimal disruption to workloads running the hosts during the patching process because it does not require virtual machines running on the hosts to be placed in maintenance mode or rebooted. 

Environment

vCenter and ESXi hosts Version 8.0 Update 3 and later 

Resolution

By default, the Live Patch feature is turned off and can only be activated when the requirements below are met. To enable live patch you must edit the global vSphere Lifecycle Manager remediation settings or the cluster level remediation settings. Steps on how to edit the settings accordingly can be found on vSphere documentation page Configure vSphere Lifecycle Manager Remediation Settings for Clusters or Standalone Hosts that You Manage with a Single Image.

Requirements for Enabling Live Patching:

• vCenter Server and the ESXi hosts in the cluster are running on version 8.0 Update 3 or above.

• All hosts in the cluster managed by vSphere Lifecycle Manager using a single image that supports the Live Patch functionality.
  
  
• The ESXi host is not in maintenance mode. If you activate Live Patch for a vCenter Server instance or a cluster and you try to install a live patch on the cluster with hosts that require maintenance mode, remediation is blocked. You can view details about the compliance of the cluster against the selected live patch image for further information.
  
  
• The desired patch has a specific live patch release for the base image vSphere Lifecycle Manager image depot provides information about all the possible versions of the ESXi  host image which you can update with a specific Live Patch release. For more information about how to browse the depot, see Browsing the vSphere Lifecycle Manager Depot.

• vSphere DRS is enabled on the cluster.
  
  
• The parallel remediation setting is deactivated. If you have both settings enabled, the remediation pre-check reports this as an issue for a successful remediation and provides you with possible solutions. Live patches can only be installed on the hosts in a cluster managed with a single image in sequence.
  
  
  

Additional Information

Configuring vSphere Lifecycle Manager for Live Patches