Managing ESXi host lifecycle operations with vSphere Lifecycle Manager Images (vLCM)

Products

• VMware vCenter Server

Issue/Introduction

Symptoms:

Background

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. 

With the launch of vSphere 8.0, we are 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.  

Note: VCF customers should NOT transition their existing VUM clusters to vLCM yet. A future VCF release will announce the support of such a transition

Environment

VMware vCenter Server 8.0.x

Resolution

Details

• For an overview of vLCM, see the blog - Introducing vSphere Lifecycle Management (vLCM)

• For details on how to transition existing clusters to vLCM, see the user guide -  Convert a Cluster That Uses Baselines Into a Cluster That Uses vSphere Lifecycle Manager Images

Requirements

vSphere Lifecycle Manager Images (vLCM) requires that both vCenter and ESXi are in vSphere 7.x or higher versions.