A few days ago, we linked to a new white paper on VMware Update Manager performance and best practices. Rich Brambley at VM /ETC had a few comments (see VMware Update Manager planning makes a difference), and he also ran an informal poll about how people are using VUM. Check it out (and feel free to still go vote yourself).
Rich is a little uneasy with keeping VUM on the same machine as VC, since it has to store potentially years of patches going forward, but it looks like that’s the easiest way and the way most people are doing it, probably because they aren’t using for all those Windows patches. Our recommendations to separate it only kick in at larger deployment sizes.
Also from Rich:
Finally, Carlo over at VMware Info has written a great how to post for patching ESX with VUM.
The VUM Administration Guide seems to be a little difficult to follow
to me, and Carlo’s post is straight forward about how to configure VUM
for updating ESX hosts.