I think I understand this process, but it is so insanely tedious and awful that I'm hoping that I'm missing something...
I manage a very large VMWare enviornment with multple clusters and numerous physical hosts. The nature of our environment requires us to patch systems on a very tight schedule and we have to carefully specify what systems get patched when. A patching cycle for us is a fairly manual process and uses dozens of separate machine groups and schedules. As a result of all of this we have to add VMs to machine groups individually instead of just selecting all VMs under a specific Virtual Center. So what I am doing is running a PowerCLI command to find out what physial host my VM is currently sitting on, going in to the Hosted Virtual Machines tab in the Machine Group, selecting the Virtual Center that the physical host is part of, and then scrolling through the list of hosts to find that physical host, expanding it and finding my VM and finally adding the VM to the group. If this was just a few VMs this would be fine, but I am having to do this for hundreds of VMs every patching cycle! I don't understand why the physical host comes in to this at all? From what I can tell Shavlik only tracks the Virtual Center's name and doesn't do anything with the physical host when I add the VM to the machine group. I can setup my machine group then VMotion all of the VMs to different physical hosts and Shavlik is still able to snapshot and patch the VMs without issue.
Am I missing something here? Is there a better way of dealing with this?
Thanks
I manage a very large VMWare enviornment with multple clusters and numerous physical hosts. The nature of our environment requires us to patch systems on a very tight schedule and we have to carefully specify what systems get patched when. A patching cycle for us is a fairly manual process and uses dozens of separate machine groups and schedules. As a result of all of this we have to add VMs to machine groups individually instead of just selecting all VMs under a specific Virtual Center. So what I am doing is running a PowerCLI command to find out what physial host my VM is currently sitting on, going in to the Hosted Virtual Machines tab in the Machine Group, selecting the Virtual Center that the physical host is part of, and then scrolling through the list of hosts to find that physical host, expanding it and finding my VM and finally adding the VM to the group. If this was just a few VMs this would be fine, but I am having to do this for hundreds of VMs every patching cycle! I don't understand why the physical host comes in to this at all? From what I can tell Shavlik only tracks the Virtual Center's name and doesn't do anything with the physical host when I add the VM to the machine group. I can setup my machine group then VMotion all of the VMs to different physical hosts and Shavlik is still able to snapshot and patch the VMs without issue.
Am I missing something here? Is there a better way of dealing with this?
Thanks