Life Cycle Management Design of vCenter Server for a Virtual Infrastructure Workload Domain

Life cycle management of vCenter Server includes the process of performing patch updates or upgrades to the vCenter Server appliance. Always consider the impact of such an operation on the management solutions that are connected to the VI workload domain vCenter Server.

You use SDDC Manager for life cycle management of the VI workload domain vCenter Server and other management components that form the VMware Cloud Foundation instance.

Table 1. Design Decisions on Life Cycle Management of a VI Workload Domain vCenter Server

Decision ID	Design Decision	Design Justification	Design Implication
VCF-WLD-VCS-LCM-001	Use SDDC Manager to perform the life cycle management of the VI workload domain vCenter Server.	Because the deployment scope of SDDC Manager covers the full SDDC stack, SDDC Manager performs patching, update, or upgrade of the VI workload domain as a single process. Performing life cycle management tasks by using vCenter Server directly might cause issues in SDDC Manager.	The operations team must understand and be aware of the impact of a patch, segmentation, or upgrade operation by using SDDC Manager.