You can retrieve information about VMware products associated with vCenter Server, list available vCenter Server updates, and produce reports. The findings can help you plan vCenter Server updates in your environment.

The life cycle management API provides operations that are grouped in the discovery, update, and reports categories. The discovery functionality of the API consists of the operations in the discovery category. The planning functionality of the API consists of the operations in the update category. Both functionalities can produce reports that you can download by using the reports category.

The discovery category provides operations for listing VMware products that can be associated with vCenter Server, managing products associations, and creating interoperability reports. The update category provides operations for listing all available updates and upgrades for vCenter Server and generating a pre-check compatibility report. The reports category provides an operation for downloading reports generated by interoperability and pre-check operations. By using the retrieved information, you can select one of the available patches and can plan an actual patch or upgrade for a specific vCenter Server version.

The following table lists the operations that are available in the discovery category.

Table 1. Discovery User Operations
Operation Description
Get product catalog You can retrieve a list of all VMware products that can be associated with vCenter Server.
List associated products You can retrieve a list of all VMware product deployments in the environment that are associated with vCenter Server.
Note: The list contains both product deployments discovered automatically and deployments registered manually through the API.
Get associated product information You can retrieve detailed information about a product associated with vCenter Server.
Create product association You can manually associate a VMware product with vCenter Server.
Update product association You can modify a manually added VMware product that is associated with vCenter Server.
Note: You cannot modify VMware products that are discovered automatically.
Delete product association You can delete or dissociate a manually added VMware product that is associated with vCenter Server.
Note: You cannot delete or dissociate VMware products that are discovered automatically.
Create interoperability report You can create an interoperability report between a vCenter Server release version and all products registered with the vCenter Server instance.

The following table lists the operations that are available in the update category.

Table 2. Update User Operations
Operation Description
List updates You can retrieve a list of all available vCenter Server updates. The list can contain minor, in-place, updates and major, migration-based, upgrades.
Get update info You can retrieve detailed vCenter Server information about a specific update or upgrade.
Create pre-check report You can create a vCenter Server pre-update compatibility check report for a pending update version.
Note: You can export and download the report in CSV format.

The following table lists the operations that are available in the reports category.

Table 3. Reports User Operations
Operation Description
Get report You can download the report generated by the interoperability and pre-check operations. For information about downloading the report, see the API reference documentation.

You can run life cycle management operations by using the vSphere Automation SDK or sending an HTTP request. For information about the HTTP requests that you can use to perform the user operations, see HTTP Requests for Discovery and Planning Operations. In addition to sending HTTP requests, you can also run cURL commands to perform operations. See cURL Examples of Performing Discovery and Planning Operations.