With the introduction of vSphere 8, vSphere Lifecycle Manager baselines (VUM) have been deprecated. We can instead manage the lifecycle of the ESXi hosts in our environment by using “desired” images (vLCM).

In this post, we’ll upgrade an ESXi 7 host to ESXi 8 using a vLCM image.

vLCM enables centralized and simplified lifecycle management for VMware ESXi hosts through the use of images and baselines. It is a service that runs in vCenter Server and uses the embedded vPostgreSQL database. No additional installation is required to start using that feature. Upon deploying the vCSA, the vLCM user interface becomes automatically enabled in the vSphere Client.

In vSphere releases earlier than 7.0, vSphere Update Manager (VUM) provided us with the ability to use baselines and baseline groups for host patching and host upgrade operations. In addition to the baseline method, vLCM introduced the option of using vSphere Lifecycle Manager images as an alternative way to manage the lifecycle of the hosts and clusters in our environment.

With vSphere 7.0, the desired image method was a cluster only feature. Starting with vSphere 8.0, we can use an image to manage the lifecycle of any standalone ESXi host that is part of our vCenter Server inventory.

The setup in my lab is as follows:

  • A vCenter Server version 8 U3
  • A freshly installed ESXi host using version 7, which is already added to the vCenter Server

1. To make use of the desired image method, we’re first navigating to the Host in the vCenter inventory and select Updates > Image:

    2. Next, we click on Setup Image Manually and define an image to use (in our case an image with ESXi version 8.0 U3 and no other components inside):

      3. The second step is to check the image compliance:

      4. The host is marked as “out of compliance with the image”, we click on Finish Image Setup.

      5. Now, we’re actually able to make use of the image by performing the host upgrade.

      6. First, we run the pre-check by clicking on Run pre-check, and afterwards we do the actual upgrade by clicking on Remediate:

      The host is now being remediated and rebooted. The Remediate Host task appear in the Recent Tasks pane. We can also observe the progress of the remediation task in the Image Compliance card. After some minutes, the host is available again in vCenter Server and successfully upgraded to version 8. If remediation fails, vSphere Lifecycle Manager gives information about the reasons for the failure.