Life cycle management details the design decisions for the life cycle management of the vRealize Automation cluster.

Life cycle management of vRealize Automation involves the process of applying updates or upgrades to vRealize Automation. After the deployment of vRealize Automation, both SDDC Manager and vRealize Suite Lifecycle Manager provide the life cycle management of vRealize Automation.

Table 1. Design Decisions on the Life Cycle Management of vRealize Automation

Decision ID

Design Decision

Design Justification

Design Implication

PCA-VRA-LCM-001

  • For VMware Cloud Foundation 4.4, use vRealize Suite Lifecycle Manager to perform the life cycle management of vRealize Automation.

  • For VMware Cloud Foundation 4.3.1 and earlier, use SDDC Manager to apply vRealize Automation upgrades.

  • For VMware Cloud Foundation 4.4, vRealize Suite Lifecycle Manager manages the product binaries and vRealize Automation upgrades.

  • For VMware Cloud Foundation 4.3.1 and earlier, SDDC Manager provides the upgrade bundles to vRealize Suite Lifecycle Manager and manages vRealize Log Insight upgrades through the integration with vRealize Suite Lifecycle Manager.

  • You must deploy vRealize Suite Lifecycle Manager by using SDDC Manager.

  • vRealize Suite Lifecycle Manager manages patches, updates, and hot fixes for vRealize Automation.

PCA-VRA-LCM-002

Use vRealize Suite Lifecycle Manager to apply vRealize Automation patches and hot fixes.

Patches, updates, and hot fixes for vRealize Automation are not managed by SDDC Manager.

Before applying the updates to vRealize Automation, you must use vRealize Suite Lifecycle Manager to automate the download or manually upload the product binaries to vRealize Suite Lifecycle Manager.