Baseline Types

Update Manager supports different types of baselines that you can use when scanning and remediating objects in your inventory.

Update Manager provides upgrade, patch, and extension baselines.

Upgrade Baselines

Baseline	Description
Host Upgrade Baseline	Defines to which version to upgrade the hosts in your environment. With Update Manager 6.5, you can upgrade ESXi hosts from version 5.5 and 6.0 to ESXi 6.5.
Virtual Appliance Upgrade Baseline	Defines to which version to upgrade a selected virtual appliance. For example, you can upgrade to the latest released virtual appliance version by using the predefined VA Upgrade to Latest (Predefined) baseline.
Virtual Machine Upgrade Baseline	Defines to which version to upgrade virtual hardware or VMware Tools. With Update Manager 6.5 you can upgrade to hardware version vmx-13 and to the latest VMware Tools version on hosts that are running ESXi 6.5.

Patch Baselines

Patch baselines define a number of patches that must be applied to a given host. Patch baselines can be either dynamic or fixed.

Baseline	Description
Dynamic Patch Baseline	The contents of a dynamic baseline are based on available patches that meet the specified criteria. As the set of available patches changes, dynamic baselines are updated as well. You can explicitly include or exclude any patches.
Fixed Patch Baseline	You manually specify which patches to include in the fixed patch baseline from the total set of patches available in the Update Manager repository.

Extension Baselines

Baseline	Description
Extension Baseline	Contains extensions (additional software such as third-party device drivers) that must be applied to a given host. Extensions are installed on hosts that do not have such software installed on them, and patched on hosts that already have the software installed. All third-party software for ESXi hosts is classified as a host extension, although host extensions are not restricted to just third-party software.

Baseline

Description

Extension Baseline

Contains extensions (additional software such as third-party device drivers) that must be applied to a given host. Extensions are installed on hosts that do not have such software installed on them, and patched on hosts that already have the software installed. All third-party software for ESXi hosts is classified as a host extension, although host extensions are not restricted to just third-party software.