With vSphere 5 there is also an updated Update Manager. This is pretty much the same Update Manager we are familiar with in VUM4 but there is one suprise, or shock another might say?!

Update Manager 5 no longer provides updates to the guest OS (Windows and Linux) as in previous releases.You will need to use something such as WSUS or System Center for Windows and setup your own update repo for Linux.

It does still provide updates for hosts, including upgrading from ESX/ESXi 4 to ESXi 5.

You cannot upgrade from ESX/ESXi 3.x to ESXi 5 (as one would expect).

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With SRM it is possible to change the IP settings for VMs between the DR site and production site, as VMs failover and failback between the sites, without manual IP changes.

In SRM 5 there is a new UI for modifying the IP customisations at a per VM level, this allows changing of IP address, mask, default gateway, DNS and WINS servers.

So for example here we have SRMDEMOVM1 which at the production site has IP 172.16.100.173 and at the DR site has IP 10.1.100.173 also with respective gateway and DNS server IP changes between sites.

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Okay so it's now into Friday evening and I'm looking at a ThinApp Office 2010 licensing issue (cancel that - swearing at an office licensing issue) - that I'm sure I fixed once before for another customer. I don't fancy this eating away at me, now what was it?! Ah ha...

The error I'm getting when trying to run the ThinApp is as follows:

"Microsoft Office cannot verify the license for this application. A repair attempt failed or was canceled by the user. The Application will now shut down."

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Firstly what is vCenter Operations Manager, also known as vCOPS? VMware describe it as follows..

"vCenter Operations Manager (vCOPS) automates operations management using patented analytics and an integrated approach to performance, capacity and configuration management."

I'm my words.. vCOPS provides integrated, intelligent monitoring of the entire virtual (or cloud) environment. This could be simply vSphere (vCenter and ESXi) and it's virtual machines, or it could extend to capacity, networking devices, storage. Perhaps you would like to monitor physical servers and the operating system within both virtual and physical machines including checking for compliance. vCOPS can do all of this.

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