vSphere Lifecycle Manager Feature Spotlight: Standalone Hosts

Typically, ESXi hosts reside within vSphere clusters. However, there are many instances of standalone hosts, or non-clustered hosts, that serve important purposes. vSphere Lifecycle Manager can manage these standalone hosts and perform all the same operations you know from clusters including using a declarative image, image recommendations, staging, firmware patching and custom depots.

Use Case

While we’re not going to go into the use cases for running standalone hosts, the use case for managing these hosts lifecycle using vSphere Lifecycle Manager is very simple. You get all the benefits that vSphere Lifecycle Manager provides to vSphere clusters but to standalone hosts. Same workflows, same operational efficiencies, and the same modern declarative image approach to ESXi lifecycle.

Using vSphere Lifecycle Manager with Standalone Hosts

Using vSphere Lifecycle Manager with standalone hosts is almost identical to using it with vSphere clusters. It is very simple to setup the declarative image and define the ESXi version and Vendor Addons, or you can simply import the current image from the running ESXi host.

The same functions you may be familiar with are all available. Edit the image definition. Run pre-checks to ensure lifecycle operations will succeed. Stage patches, updates, or upgrades in advance of remediation. Remediate the host to update it’s running software.

Note: Managing standalone hosts with vSphere Lifecycle Manager using the vSphere Client requires vCenter 8 Update 1. You can manage standalone hosts with vSphere Lifecycle Manager using APIs in vCenter 8.

You can see an overview of all standalone hosts managed by vSphere Lifecycle Manager at a vCenter or Datacenter level and see at a glance, the compliance of these hosts against their defined image.

One use case for standalone hosts is for hosts that may sit on the edge or remote office. This could mean that the connectivity or bandwidth between vCenter and these remote hosts might not be as good as it would be within a physical data center and may result in patch, update or upgrade payloads failing to transmit from vCenter to the remote ESXi hosts. To solve this potential issue, each standalone host can be defined with one or more custom depots.

This allows the ESXi host to pull patch, update, or upgrade payloads from a repository that is co-located with the ESXi host thus removing the potential transmission failures that could occur over a poorer connection.

Summary

vSphere Lifecycle Manager can manage these standalone hosts and perform all the same operations you know from clusters including using a declarative image, image recommendations, staging, firmware patching and custom depots.

References

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