Remediate ESXi Hosts Against a Single Baseline or Multiple Baselines

You can remediate hosts against attached patch, upgrade, and extension baselines or baseline groups.

You can remediate a host against a single baseline, multiple baselines of the same type, or against a baseline group. To remediate against baselines of different types, you must create a baseline group. Baseline groups might contain multiple patch and extension baselines, or an upgrade baseline combined with multiple patch and extension baselines.

You can remediate ESXi hosts against a single attached upgrade baseline at a time. You can upgrade all hosts in your vSphere inventory by using a single upgrade baseline that contains an ESXi 6.7 image.

You can remediate a single ESXi host or a group of ESXi hosts in a container object, such as a folder, a cluster, or a data center. You can also initiate remediation at a vCenter Server level.

Note:

If a vCenter HA failover is initiated during the remediation of a cluster, the remediation task is canceled. After the failover finishes, you must restart the remediation task on the new node.

Prerequisites

• Required privileges: VMware vSphere Update Manager.Manage Patches and Upgrades.Remediate to Apply Patches, Extensions, and Upgrades.
• Attach a patch, upgrade, or extension baseline or a baseline group containing patches, upgrades, and extensions to the host.
• Resolve any issues that occur during Remediation Pre-check.
• In upgrade scenarios, verify that the ESXi hosts to upgrade have a boot disk of at least 4 GB. When booting from a local disk, SAN or iSCSI LUN, up to 128 GB of disk space is used to create ESXi system partitions. You can create a VMFS datastore on a boot disk larger than 128 GB.

Procedure

1. In the vSphere Client, navigate to the vSphere Lifecycle Manager compliance view for an individual host or a container object.
   1. Navigate to a host, cluster, or a container object.
   2. Click the Updates tab.
2. Select Hosts > Baselines.
3. In the Attached Baselines and Baseline Groups pane, select the baselines and baseline groups to use for remediation.
   You can select a single baseline or baseline group. You can also select multiple baselines and baseline groups. Your selection of baselines and baseline groups must contain only one upgrade baseline.
4. Click Remediate.
   If the selected baselines and baseline groups do not contain an upgrade image, the Remediate dialog box opens.

   If the selected baselines and baseline groups contain an upgrade image, the End User License Agreement dialog box opens.

5. If the selection of baselines and baseline groups contains an upgrade baseline, accept the terms and the license agreement in the End User License Agreement dialog box.
   After you accept the agreement and click OK to close the dialog box, the Remediate dialog box opens.
6. In the Remediate dialog box, review the remediation settings and make any necessary changes.
   1. Review the list of actions that vSphere Lifecycle Manager must perform to ensure successful remediation.
   2. (Optional) To generate a full pre-remediation check report, click Show Full Remediation Pre-Check Report.
      If you select this option, the Remediate dialog box closes and vSphere Lifecycle Manager does not proceed with the remediation process. Instead, the Remediation Pre-Check dialog box opens. After you review the results from the pre-remediation check, you must initiate remediation again.
   3. Review the list of hosts to be remediated and deselect any host that you do not want to remediate.
      The list contains all the hosts to which the selected baselines and baseline groups are attached. Even if you navigated to a single host before initiating remediation, the list might display multiple hosts to be remediated. All hosts in the list are selected by default. Deselecting hosts from the list changes the overall number of hosts to be remediated.
7. (Optional) To view information about the updates that will be installed during the remediation, expand the Install list.
   If the selection of baselines and baseline groups contains an upgrade baseline, information about the ESXi image is also displayed.
8. (Optional) To schedule the remediation task for a later time, expand Scheduling Options and configure the scheduled task.
   By default, the remediation task starts immediately after closing the Remediate dialog box.
9. Expand Remediation settings and review the remediation settings.
   • To disable Quick Boot, deselect the respective check box in the table.
   • To disable health checks after remediation, disable the respective check box in the table.
   • To ignore warnings about unsupported hardware devices, select the respective check box in the table.
   • To change any other of the remediation settings, click the Close Dialog And Go To Settings link above the table.

     If you select this option, the Remediate dialog box closes and vSphere Lifecycle Manager does not proceed with the remediation process. Instead, you are redirected to the Baselines Remediation Settings pane on the Settings tab of the vSphere Lifecycle Manager home view. To change any of the remediation settings, click the Edit button. Remediation does not resume automatically. After you make the desired changes, you must initiate remediation again.

10. Click Remediate.

Results

Depending on the remediation schedule, the remediation task starts immediately or runs later.