After you set up UMDS, you can download upgrades, patches and notifications to the machine on which UMDS is installed.

Administrator level access is not a requirement for downloading data with UMDS that runs on Linux.

Procedure

  1. Log in to the machine where UMDS is installed, and open a Command Prompt window.
  2. Navigate to the directory where UMDS is installed.
    The default location in 64-bit Linux is /usr/local/vmware-umds.
  3. Download the selected updates. 
    vmware-umds -D
    This command downloads all the upgrades, patches and notifications from the configured sources for the first time. Subsequently, it downloads all new patches and notifications released after the previous UMDS download.
  4. (Optional) If you have already downloaded upgrades, patches, and notifications and want to download them again, you can include the start and end times to restrict the data to download.
    The command to re-download patches and notifications deletes the existing data from the patch store (if present) and re-downloads it.
    To re-download the upgrades, patches and notifications that were downloaded in November 2010, for example, run the following command: 
    vmware-umds -R --start-time 2010-11-01T00:00:00 --end-time 2010-11-30T23:59:59
    The data previously downloaded for the specified period is deleted and downloaded again.

What to do next

Export the downloaded upgrades, patches, and notifications.