vSphere Lifecycle Manager Feature Spotlight: Parallel Remediation

Why do the same operation one-by-one several times when you can do multiple operations at the same time? vSphere Lifecycle Manager allows you to remediate multiple hosts at the same time. We call this parallel remediation.

Use Case

The use case for parallel remediation is very simple. You want to remediate the cluster in the shortest time possible and what better way to achieve that than remediating more than one host at a time!

Using vSphere Lifecycle Manager Parallel Remediation

Parallel remediation is deactivated by default, but you can activate it during remediation for a specific cluster or in the vSphere Lifecycle Manager general remediation settings.

When activated, parallel remediation will only remediate hosts that have be manually prepared in maintenance mode. Any hosts that are not in maintenance mode will be skipped during a parallel remediation operation. Parallel remediation will not automatically place any hosts into maintenance mode. You can define the maximum number of concurrent remediations. Leaving the default automatic will let vSphere Lifecycle Manager determine the how many concurrent operations it can perform. Typically, this means it will remediate all hosts in maintenance mode at the same time.

Alternatively, you can choose Manual and enter a value from 1 to 96, where 96 is the maximum number of a hosts a cluster may support. In this case, vSphere Lifecycle Manager will still remediate all hosts in maintenance mode, but it will do so in groups defined by the value entered.

Note: Performing parallel remediation is not supported for vSAN clusters, clusters active for vSphere with Tanzu, or clusters running NSX. For more see the vSphere Lifecycle Manager documentation on:

• vSAN clusters and vSphere Lifecycle Manager
• vSphere Lifecycle Manager and vSphere with Tanzu
• vSphere Lifecycle Manager and VMware NSX

When you remediate hosts in parallel, if the remediation of a single host fails, the remediation task for the entire cluster does not stop and the rest of the hosts are remediated successfully. After remediation finishes, vSphere Lifecycle Manager reports an error for the respective host.

In this example, we remediate four hosts in parallel.

Summary

vSphere Lifecycle Manager allows you to remediate multiple hosts at the same time dramatically reducing the total time needed to patch, update, or upgrade a vSphere cluster.

References

For more on parallel remediation using vSphere Lifecycle Manager, see the vSphere documentation.