Upgrading Virtual Machines

With vSphere Lifecycle Manager, you can upgrade the VMware Tools version and the hardware version of a virtual machine. You can also upgrade multiple virtual machines simultaneously if the virtual machines are in a container object, such as a folder or vApp. You can also upgrade simultaneously all virtual machines that run on a host, in a cluster, or in a data center.

vSphere Lifecycle Manager supports upgrading powered on, suspended, and powered off virtual machines.

During the upgrade of VMware Tools, the virtual machines must be powered on. If a virtual machine is in the powered off or suspended state before remediation, vSphere Lifecycle Manager powers it on. After the upgrade completes, vSphere Lifecycle Manager restarts the machine and restores the original power state of the virtual machine.

During the virtual hardware upgrade, the virtual machines must be powered off. If a virtual machine is powered on, vSphere Lifecycle Manager powers the machine off, upgrades the virtual hardware, and then powers the virtual machine on.

You can also upgrade VMware Tools and the hardware version of a virtual machine template. A template is a copy of a virtual machine that you can use to create and provision new virtual machines.

You can set up automatic upgrades of VMware Tools on power cycle. For more information, see Automatically Upgrade VMware Tools on Reboot.

You can configure vSphere Lifecycle Manager to take snapshots of virtual machines and to keep the snapshots indefinitely or for a specific period of time. By using snapshots, you can roll back a virtual machine to its previous state if upgrading the virtual machine with vSphere Lifecycle Manager fails. After the upgrade finishes, you can delete the snapshots if you do not need them. For more information about configuring virtual machine rollback settings, see Configure Virtual Machine Rollback Settings.

You can upgrade virtual machines immediately or schedule an upgrade operation to run at a convenient time.

If a host is connected to vCenter Server by using an IPv6 address, you cannot scan and remediate virtual machines that run on the host.