Overview of the Update Manager Client Interfaces

The Update Manager server has a client interface for the vSphere Web Client and the vSphere Client.

The Update Manager client interfaces do not require any installation, and are automatically enabled in the vSphere Web Client and the vSphere Client after you install the Update Manager server component on Windows, or deploy the vCenter Server Appliance.

Starting with vSphere 6.7 Update 3m, you can see the Update Manager client interface in the vSphere Client even when the Update Manager server component is installed on a Windows machine. In earlier releases, if you use Update Manager server that runs on Windows, you can see the Update Manager client component only in the vSphere Web Client. If you use Update Manager with the vCenter Server Appliance, the Update Manager client component is available in both the vSphere Web Client and the vSphere Client. However, because of the deprecation of the Adobe Flash Player, using the Flash-based vSphere Web Client is not recommended. For detailed information about the Adobe Flash Player End of Life (EOL) and its impact on different VMware products, see the VMware knowledge base article at https://kb.vmware.com/s/article/78589.

If your vCenter Server system is connected to other vCenter Server systems by a common vCenter Single Sign-On domain, and you have installed and registered more than one Update Manager instance, you can configure the settings for each Update Manager instance. Configuration properties that you modify are applied only to the Update Manager instance that you specify and are not propagated to the other instances in the group. You can specify an Update Manager instance by selecting the name of the vCenter Server system with which the Update Manager instance is registered from the navigation bar. In vSphere 6.7, you can make configuration changes only by using the Update Manager client interface in the vSphere Web Client.

For a vCenter Server system that is connected to other vCenter Server systems by a common vCenter Single Sign-On domain, you can also manage baselines and baseline groups as well as scan and remediate only the inventory objects managed by the vCenter Server system with which Update Manager is registered.

The Update Manager client interface have two main views, administration view and compliance view.