VMWare ESXi with out agent on VMHost can deploy Patches

[Nagaraj]

Hi,

VMWare ESXi hosts with out installing IBM Bigfix agents on their VM-Host,

Can we deploy the patches for those Hosts?

If we are not installing the bigfix agents on each host mean we can take the Patches summary report! am i right?

Thanks,
Nagaraj.

[dpowers1]

I assume you are talking about integration with the VMware ESXi host - this give you the API commands to do things such as SNAPSHOT / POWER UP, / etc. As far as patches go, you can only deploy to a REAL BigFix agent, so you can’t send patches if you don’t install an agent to the VM.

Same goes for the Patch summary - if there is no agent, there is no inspector - hence you won’t get a patch report for the actual VM OS.

The ESXI patch report is audit only…

[JasonWalker]

Are you talking about installing patches to the OS inside the virtual machine, or deploying patches/updates for the VMWare product itself?

I thought the VMWare Proxy Agent, integrated with VMWare VCenter, could send patches to the ESXi host using VCenter’s patch deployment capability.

(I haven’t actually used it myself though).

[Nagaraj]

@dpowers1, @JasonWalker
If I want to deploy the patches to VMWare EXSi hosts (winows 7, RHEL 7, Cent OS 6, Windows 2012) mean i have to install the Bigfix agent on those hosts right?

[strawgate]

VMWare EXSi hosts

I think the confusion here is with the terminology you are using. An ESXi Host is the box running VMWare. An ESXi Guest is the VM running Windows, RHEL, CentOS, etc.

Are you trying to get patch information for the box running VMWare or the boxes running Windows, RHEL, and CentOS?

If it’s the vms running Windows, RHEL, and CentOS that you’re interested in then you will need to install the BigFix Agent on those.

[Nagaraj]

@strawgate
OK, thank you

As my understanding if i installed the bigfix agent on those VM box running Windows, RHEL mean I can do a offline patches for the VM Host (Windows , RHEL), If I cannot install the Bigfix agent on this VM host (windows, RHEL) mean i cannot deploy patches to that VM host (windows , RHEL).

IF i configured the ESXi box integration mean which type of report I can get
The Patches audit report for the VMWare ESXi box (or) audit report for VM box running Windows, RHEL ?

[erez1]

can you add some details, since a customer of mine wants to monitor the HOST ESXi-Box Itself , through BigFix, while I , trying to get him of , from that idea, since those esxi host all of the company globally .
The esxi is Linux , but its not regular Linux , Since OS Act as VMware mask in ver6.5 , so apm does not succedd run.