To keep the infrastructure healthy, ESXi hosts and vCenter Servers must be patched on a regular basis.

ESXi hosts can be patched and updated using the command line if a vCenter Server is not available in the network. The vCSA can be patched and updated using the command line by staging and remediating the mounted ISO image patch file or through the VAMI that provides a graphic UI.

We talked about VMware Update Manager, a tool used to automate the patching and upgrading procedures of the ESXi hosts installed in the network as well as to install VMware Tools and upgrade the hardware version of the VM.

The chapter explained the upgrade and migration procedures to vSphere 6.5. Both processes must be carefully planned to ensure the compatibility of the used programs and the correct upgrade procedure. The upgrade process can be split into three stages—pre-migration, migration, and validation. The Migration Tool provided with vSphere 6.5 simplifies the migration of vSphere vCenter Servers from version 5.5 Update 3 and 6.0 to version 6.5.

The next chapter will explain the business continuity concepts and the implementation of the disaster recovery strategy to ensure data and service availability, avoiding downtime in case of dramatic failures.