In order to modify the Download Settings of the VMware Update Manager (VUM) from the vSphere Client browse to Home > Solutions and Applications > Update Manager > Download Settings.
If you have a proxy server installed on your local area network to act as an intermediary for requests from the VUM component, the download settings allow for a proxy server to be configured where the proxy server IP address, port and login credentials can be specified to access the proxy server and then once configured the ‘Test Connection’ link can verify the configuration.
VUM can be configured to use additional download sources where it may be required to download third party patches, extensions and upgrades. For Example, you may require to download extensions from the Dell online depot by specifyin a URL address for the third party download source, optionally add a description and validate the URL to confirm the source URL.
The download schedule can be configured by browsing to Home > Solutions and Applications > Update Manager > Download Schedule and selecting ‘Edit Download Schedule’. From the the schedule task options you may configure the time and frequency of the task and request email notification when new patches are downloaded.
By default, VUM using a direct connection to the internet to download new patches and virtual appliance upgrades as specified by the Download Schedule. However as discussed in http://wp.me/p15Mdc-wd , in the scenario where VUM server does not have access to the internet, there may be a requirement to install the VUM Download Service (UMDS) on a separate server to which the internet is accessible
To configure UMDS, you will required to use the command line utility ‘C:\Program Files (x86)\VMware\Infrastructure\Update Manager\vmware-umds.exe‘ on the UMDS server, to enable or disable the download of host system and virtual appliance updates. For example, in order to enable the download of host system updates but disable virtual appliance updates you will be required to invoke the following command on the UMDS server
vmware-umds -S -enable-host -disable-va
Now that we have configured UDMS to download patches and upgrades for host systems only in the above example, we will need to perform the initial download by invoking the following command:
vmware-umds -D
Once the initial download has been performed we can export the data to a shared repository by invoking the following command:
vmware-umds -E --export-store D:\UDMS\repository
The VUM server can now be configured to use the shared repository by placing the export store on an internal web server or file share and by browsing to Home > Solutions and Applications > Update Manager > Download Settings configure the download source to use a shared repository. In order to test the configuration you may select the ‘Download Now’ option.
An offline bundle may also be downloaded and the updates imported to the VUM server by selecting the ‘Import Patches’ hyperlink in the download sources option and specifying the local path to the zip file containing the patches you require to import.
Finally, we can modify the location of the VUM repository which is configured during installation by modifying the vci-integrity.xml file to set the patchStore value. I have previously written a post on this procedure here.
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