Installing UMDS on Linux and Windows Operating System

A little under a year ago I wrote a guide on how to install UMDS 6.7 on Windows with a SQL Server database with a PowerShell script to schedule it at regular intervals. Back then it was still necessary to have a database for UMDS to work.

Although it was ok with Windows, getting it to work on Linux with a PostgreSQL was really not that easy. The VMware doc covered less than the bare minimum with lots of dependencies not mentioned and random version compatibility issues.

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Thankfully all this trouble was removed in the latest version UMDS 6.7 Update 1 which lifted the requirement for a database.

In this blog, I will cover how to install and configure UMDS on Windows and on Linux. I will also cover the basics of how to schedule it but I’m sure those of you who are looking to install it in Linux will do a much better job of it than me. A lot of the work on the Windows platform was covered in the blog aforementioned so I will send you back there for some of the pre/post-configuration.

What is UMDS?

You may not be familiar with UMDS (Update Manager Download Service) as it is an optional module of Update Manager and is not advertised much by VMware.

Its purpose is to download updates and patches from VMware’s and third-party repositories and act as an internal repository to which several instances of vSphere Update Manager can subscribe and download updates from.

UMDS downloads upgrades for virtual appliances, patch metadata, patch binaries, and notifications that would not otherwise be available to the Update Manager server. Like WSUS in the Windows world, UMDS is particularly useful in environments with multiple vCenter to centralize the patches and download them only once.

What is great is that it also supports patch recalls and notifications so you don’t end up deploying rotten patches in production.

In the latest release of UMDS version 6.7 update 1, I was pleasantly surprised to see that VMware is still putting some effort into improving this tool which is, in my opinion, underrated.

It is not in use by every company as it solves challenges that not everyone faces:

Secured environment with no access to internet. UMDS can access its public repositories through internal web proxies and act as a sort of a gateway
Consolidation of updates location for environments with a large number of vCenter servers

What’s new in UMDS 6.7 U1?

In vSphere 6.7 Update 1 VMware removed requirements for a database to run UMDS. Installing and setting up a database is no longer a prerequisite and the installation procedure has been simplified.

Now it was already fairly simple to install in earlier versions, the blog linked above testifies, however installing UMDS on Linux Red Hat is a lot trickier. VMware provided close to no documentation about it and the packages dependencies and versions were a total mess. So removing this requirement will make it a lot easier to deploy UMDS on Red Hat.

Requirements and Considerations to Configure UMDS

There are still requirements to meet for UMDS 6.7 Update 1:

Internet connection or access via proxy to *.vmware.com/* or other public repositories you may need (Dell, HP…)
Windows OS:
- OS requirements are the same as vCenter
- Microsoft .NET framework 4.7
Linux OS:
- Create a PATH variable to the vmware-umds service (optional)
- Ubuntu 14.04
- Ubuntu 18.04
- Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7.4
- Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7.5
vSphere Update Manager 6.7 Update 1

Uninstall any 6.5 or earlier instance of UMDS if it is installed on the machine. If such a version of UMDS is already installed, the installation wizard displays an error message and the installation cannot proceed.

Before starting, be aware of the following :

The server on which you plan to install UMDS must have access to the public repositories you want updates to download from (VMware, Dell, HP…). The bare minimum is access to *.vmware.com/* in https (443)
All vCenter servers must have access to the UMDS server on port 80 (http)
You cannot upgrade an existing instance of UMDS. You can uninstall the current version and perform a fresh installation of the new one. However, you can use the existing patch store from the UMDS you uninstalled
UMDS 6.7 Update 1 can only be used with vSphere Update Manager 6.7 Update 1 (officially, but it works with 6.7). If you have other versions of VUM in your environment, a separate UMDS server must be used for each one of them
In order for vSphere Update Manager to be able to download Patches directly from UMDS you need to store the patches on a web server, that would typically run on the UMDS server (IIS, Apache…). If you decide not to do this step you will need to export the patches to a location of your choice and manually import them in Update Manager (which slightly defeats the purpose)

UMDS server sizing

VMware offers a sizing estimator to get an idea of how much disk space you will need. You can download the tool here. It was originally made for vSphere Update Manager but it can be used for UMDS as well.

Open the excel file inside the zip file and specify the characteristics of your environment in the second tab. In the bottom right you get an estimate of the disk utilization for the patches, you can disregard the database disk usage (vSphere Update Manager specific). You can choose the +20% to be on the safe side. you will see that very little space is required if you run only one or 2 ESXi versions concurrently.

Installing UMDS on a Linux Operating System (Red Hat)

Prerequisites

There are a few prerequisites for UMDS to work.

The following operating systems are the ones listed by VMware in the official documentation, I did my install on Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7.6 and it worked just fine.

ISO of vCenter Server Appliance (VCSA) 6.7 Update 1
UMDS must be of the same version as the Update Manager server
64-bit Linux-based system
Ubuntu 14.04 and 18.04 / RHEL 7.4 and 7.5
The “psmisc” package must be installed. It includes the “killall” command which is required
Web server (optional)

Pre-Installation

I will describe these steps to prepare the server in the Linux section although I will not get in great details as most Linux admins already have their ways to deal with these. It is worth noting that this how-to is based on Red Hat. It won’t make a big difference but you may have to adapt a few things if you are on Ubuntu.

Install a Web Server

If you are starting from scratch you can install your server with an embedded web server for simplified installation.

If the server is already running and has no web server installed, install it using your system’s package manager

yum install httpd

Start the web server and make sure it starts at boot time

Systemctl start httpd

Systemctl enable httpd

More information on the configuration of apache in the Red Hat documentation.

Ensure psmisc is installed

The “killall” command must be available for the UMDS installer to work. That command is part of the “psmisc” package.

To check if it is installed just type killall in the shell. if it displays the help of the command you can skip this step. If it warns “killall: command not found” you need to install it

Yum install psmisc

Installation of UMDS

I suggest you do a “su” to run the following as root to avoid permission issues.

Start by Attaching the ISO of VCSA 6.7 Update 1 to the UMDS server VM and make sure it is connected
Mount the CD in Linux

Mkdir /mnt/cd

Mount /dev/cdrom /mnt/cd

Extract the content of the UMDS installer

Mkdir /tmp/umds

Tar -zxvf /mnt/cd/umds/VMware-UMDS-6.7.0-xxxxxxxx.tar.gz -C /tmp/umds

Execute the installer

/tmp/umds/vmware-umds-distrib/vmware-install.pl

Press Enter to display the EULA and type yes at the end of it

Note that the logs will be stored in “/var/log/vmware/vmware-updatemgr/umds”

Specify a directory for the installation of UMDS or press Enter to keep the default location in “/usr/local/vmware-umds”

Type yes if you want to configure a proxy to connect to internet or press enter to leave it to no proxy. Note that you can change this later

Specify a directory to store the downloaded patches or press enter to keep the default location in “/var/lib/vmware-umds”

(Optional) Add the installation bin directory to the PATH variable to make the UMDS command available natively in the shell. Edit the path below if you didn’t use the default location

PATH=”$PATH”:/usr/local/vmware-umds/bin

The installation is now complete, you can now delete the folder containing the UMDS installer.

The next step is to make a few changes to the configuration. You can skip the Windows installation chapter and jump straight to the UMDS configuration chapter.

Post-Installation

To automate the process of downloading and exporting the patches, you can create an executable script that will run the UMDS command. The script should contain at least these two lines:

Vmware-umds -D

Vmware-umds -E

You can then configure a cron for this script to run weekly for instance. There is no point to having it run every day.