VMware Update Manager Download Service

Most people are pretty familiar with Update Manager.  What do you do when your vSphere infrastructure resides in an environment that has no internet access?

Enter VMware Update Manager Download Service(UMDS). UMDS is an optional component that comes with Update Manager. You install the service on a system that *does* have internet access and then it enables you to export the patches to another location.

UMDS can be found in the umds folder on the vCenter cd.  Installing UMDS is as simple as browsing to the folder and executing VMware-UMDS.exe.  UMDS does require a database or it will install a SQL Server Express instance.

Once you have it installed you need to open a command prompt and navigate to the directory where UMDS was installed. The first thing you need to do is configure what updates you would like to download.

vmware-umds –set-config –enable-host 1 –enable-win 0 –enable-lin 0

This will configure UMDS to only download host updates.  Change the enable-win or enable-lin parameter if you want windows and linux updates.  Also, if you don’t need ESX3.x updates any longer you can modify the downloadConfig.xml file and comment out the ESX3xupdateUrl parameter like this.  You are adding the opening and closing xml comment.

<!-- <ESX3xUpdateUrl>https://www.vmware.com/PatchManagementSystem/patchmanagement</ESX3xUpdateUrl> -->

Now time to download your updates.

vmware-umds –download

Once all of the updates have been downloaded it is time to export them to a location of your choosing. My environment isn’t completely air-gapped so I am able to use the same host I am downloading the updates as a repository.

vmware-umds –E –export-store d:\updates

This will export all of the updates to my d:\updates directory which I have published via IIS.

The last step is to configure Update Manager to point to the URL of your repository.

Note: All of this was done using UMDS 4.0.