Top 10 things you should read about patching & monitoring ESX & ESXi hosts By Eric Siebert published: Wednesday, March 04 2009
Patching and monitoring your host servers is critical to ensure they stay healthy and secure. Patching should be done on a regular basis to ensure all the latest fixes are applied to your hosts to resolve any existing security issues and program bugs. Monitoring is also vital to ensure that you can proactively detect potential problems in your environment and also so you can quickly identify existing problems. Not all problems are obvious and without monitoring you may not be aware of problems in your environment. This list consists of VMworld presentations, white papers, tips and articles on using and configuring patching and monitoring in your VI3 environment.
Best Practices for Patching VMware ESX/ESXi
This best practices document from VMware gives a brief explanation of patching and the different mechanisms for applying patches for the VMware ESX 3.5 product line. It focuses on the ESX patching model, patch packaging, and deliverables— key topics you need to understand to maintain your ESX systems.
Performance Monitoring and Capacity Planning
A VMworld 2006 presentation that covers the different aspects of performance monitoring in detail and what statistics that you should be aware of.
Update Manager Administration Guide
Documentation from VMware that provides information on how to configure Update Manager including how to install the product and configure it for use in your environment.
Patch Management for ESX Server 3.5
Documentation from VMware that provides background information on processing patches for ESX Server 3.0.3 and ESX Server 3.5 hosts and describes how to use the esxupdate utility to apply software updates and to track software installed on ESX Server 3.0.3 and ESX Server 3.5 hosts.
Interpreting esxtop Statistics
A great document that describes how to use the esxtop utility and how to interpret the various resource statistics that it reports.
Getting VMware Hardware Alerts into HP/Msft Ops Manager
A VMworld 2007 session (free registration required) that describes the options available to ensure these physical server hardware-based alerts are communicated into MOM. This session also discusses options specific to Dell, HP and IBM hardware.
Use SNMP with VMware ESX to monitor server statistics
A tip written that covers how to setup and configure SNMP to monitor ESX & ESXi hosts so you can send alerts and traps to applications that have SNMP receivers.
VMware Update Manager Performance and Best Practices
A white paper from VMware on the Update Manager patching application that covers configuration and deployment tips, resource consumption, guest operating system tuning and network latencies.
The Art of Patching your Virtual Infrastructure
An article that describes patching techniques to use with ESX and how to use the new Update Manager application to patch your hosts.
VMware ESX Server 3 Patch Management
A VMworld 2007 session (free registration required) that covers the esxupdate utility, patch information, using patch repositories, scripting patch installation and troubleshooting and cleanup.
Related Links:
Complete 'Top 10' Collection, Top 10 Things You Must Read About Virtual Machines
Eric Siebert is a 25-year IT veteran with experience in programming,
networking, telecom and systems administration. He is a guru-status
moderator on the VMware community VMTN
forum and maintains VMware-land.com,
a VI3 information site.
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