You decide on the life cycle management of the vCenter Server appliance according to amount of time and effort to perform a deployment, upgrade, or patch operation and to the impact such an operation has on the solutions that are connected to that vCenter Server.
Life cycle management of vCenter Server involves the process of performing patch updates or upgrades to the vCenter Server appliance. In a typical vSphere environment, you perform life cycle management manually. When you implement a solution by using VMware Cloud Foundation, you use SDDC Manager for life cycle management where additional components are included as part of the life cycle management process.
| Decision ID |
Design Decision |
Design Justification |
Design Implication |
|---|---|---|---|
|
SDDC-
KUBWLD-VI-VC-008
|
Use SDDC Manager to perform the lifecycle management of the 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 workload domain as a single process. Directly performing lifecycle management tasks through vCenter Server has the potential to cause issues within SDDC Manager. |
The operations team must have clear understanding and awareness of the impact of a patch, segmentation, and upgrade, or upgrade operation by using SDDC Manager. |
