VMware plans to give vSphere power to automatically patch everything running in a VM

VMware plans to give its flagship vSphere product the power to patch all the software inside a virtual machine. But first you get vSphere 7, which goes on sale today. VMware has made much of the fact that vSphere now treats both VMs and Kubernetes clusters as first-class citizens. But vanilla vSphere 7 doesn't include that …

[Locky]

Old functionallity

Back in the good old days of vSphere3, Update Manager used to be able to apply Windows updates to VMs, until MS gave them a cease and desist.

Feels like a long time ago now, but so does February

[O RLY]

Re: Old functionallity

Old enough it wasn't even vSphere yet. Virtual Infrastructure and Virtual Center 3.5 were followed by vSphere and vCenter 4.0. Nice to see that in-guest patch option come back.

[Lorribot]

That's fine until you get appliances like those from Cisco that have to pinned, can't be vMotioned, can't be backed up because you can't snapshot it and are generally still not fit for virtualisation.

Or you have SAP boxes that crumble as soon as think about a reboot or countless other apps that are developed for a world that disappeared 10 years ago.

Basically those of us who live in the real world.

[J. Cook]

THIS TIMES INFINITY.

I mean, HA and DRS ain't worth a lick if the guest OS craps itself because the cluster manager wants it on a different host.

(They also react very very poorly to their storage dropping out from underneath it, too- Ask me how I know.)

*wanders off grumbling and muttering curses at ISE*

[Anonymous Coward]

So the pitch here is that we are going to create new functionality but only give you access to it with complete lock-in to our stack. Good business.

[Androgynous Cow Herd]

Vanilla vSphere

I prefer Butter Pecan