Announcing Early Availability of VMware ESXi Lifecycle Management Service

This blog was authored by Rupesh Shimkhada, Senior Product Line Manager for VMware Cloud Platform. Rupesh has 18+ years of experience as a cloud architect and storage architect. He joined VMware IT in 2009 as a storage and cloud architect and moved to various engineering roles in 2015. Prior to VMware, he worked at IBM and several startups in the San Francisco Bay area.

On August 21st 2023, VMware announced Early Availability (EA) of VMware ESXi™ Lifecycle Management Service, which provides simple and easy ESXi fleet management of your vSphere environments from VMware Cloud. Lifecycle Management Service makes the rollout of vSphere upgrades and updates easier across multiple vCenters and customer data centers.

Here are the benefits of using ESXi Lifecycle Management Service:

• Implement standardization across vCenter and data centers
  • Implement approved images in all data centers
  • Have full compliance of install images
  • Stay current with ESXi versions

• Avoid or reduce potential security breaches
  • Apply security patches as soon as they are released
  • Stay on top of security compliance

• Faster upgrades and reduced overall maintenance window
  • Best practices and procedures are built into workflows
  • Parallel upgrades of similar clusters across vCenters

• Higher chances for upgrade success
  • Run pre-upgrade checks to find issues ahead of time
  • Stage and prepare clusters and hosts for upgrade prior to rollout

• Faster resolutions from VMware support
  • Contextual help and KB search
  • Easy “Create Support Request” button
  • Faster resolution with telemetry and logs

ESXi Lifecycle Management Service can provide end-to-end lifecycle operation workflows which include notification of new updates, qualifying updates for related objects (clusters, hosts), and grouping target objects (clusters, hosts) to run prechecks and updates. It also provides status of update workflows, showing which objects (clusters, hosts) are in-progress, succeeded or failed. In case of update failures, you can drill down to host level and look at basic logs to troubleshoot the problem and retry the update workflow.

Early Availability of ESXi Lifecycle Management Service

We are offering a limited number of early availability trials of ESXi Lifecycle Management Service within a VMware hosted environment. If you are interested, please scan the QR code below, fill out the form, and someone will contact you to schedule your early availability trial.