If you manage an environment where vSphere, vCenter and ESXi hosts are secured, air-gapped, or disconnected from other networks, including to the internet, and you can’t patch easily, you may want to consider using vSphere Update Manager Download Service…a.k.a. UMDS.

UMDS runs on Linux, and downloads software metadata, software binaries, and notifications that may not be available to vSphere Lifecycle Manager. UDMS then makes those files available to vSphere Lifecycle Manager (LCM) so administrators can then patch properly.

Here’s the official link to the documentation:

https://docs.vmware.com/en/VMware-vSphere/8.0/vsphere-lifecycle-manager/GUID-AB1032CF-2C9A-44E5-94BA-216396F167F9.html

Let’s get this installed in my lab environment.

First note that UDMS will is supported on Ubuntu and Red Hat – see the official documentation (see above) for a list of all the Linux-based operating systems.

I’m selecting Ubuntu 20.04 LTS (Server).

This is pretty straight forward…simply download the ISO from Ubuntu, spin up a new VM and attach the ISO, then run through the Ubuntu installer – standard options.

I opted to also run an apt-get update/upgrade just to be sure all is up to date:

With Ubuntu installed and updated, I can then move onto installing UDMS.

Download the ISO for vCenter – I opted to copy it over to a local datastore so I could then mount the ISO file of the vCenter Server appliance 8.0 to the Linux machine.

Create a mount point for the CDROM: sudo mkdir /mnt/cdrom

Mount the CDROM to a directory: sudo mount /dev/cdrom /mnt/cdrom

Now we can run an ‘ls -l‘ and see the files in the CDROM:

Change directory into the CDROM folder /mnt/cdrom/umds, and copy the contents of udms to a local folder on the box…I chose /media:

Now let’s un-archive the tar.gz file…

sudo tar -xvzf VMware-UMDS-8.0.2.00100.11979815.tar.gz

After the files extract, I cd into the new directory called “vmware-umds-distrib”, and ran the installation script by typing sudo ./vmware-install.pl

Accept the EULA (type yes) and then let’s install in the default directories. Answering the rest of the questions…I used the default locations for storing patches, and I entered my proxy information, then the install is complete.

That’s all for the installation!

Check out the next blog that will cover the setup and configuration. You can find that blog right here!