Schedule

Most of my home network runs on my Raspberry Pi Kubernetes cluster , and for the most part it’s rock solid. However, applications being applications, sometimes they become less responsive than they should (or for example, when my Synology updates itself and reboots, any mounted NFS volumes can cause the running pods to degrade in performance). This isn’t an issue with service liveliness, which can be mitigated with a liveness probe that restarts the pod if a service isn’t running.

The vSphere UMDS provides a way to download patches for VMware servers that have an air-gap, or for some reason aren’t allowed to go out to the internet themselves – in my case a security policy prevented a DMZ vCenter Server from connecting to the internet directly. The solution is to use UMDS to download the updates to a 2nd server that was hosted in the DMZ and then update the vCenter Server from there. It also can save on bandwidth if you’re running multiple vCenter Servers, which again was the case (though bandwidth isn’t really a constraint).