Update

<img class=“alignright wp-image-5603 size-medium” src="/images/2015/02/cisco_SG300-20_1.png" alt=“Cisco SG300-20” width=“300” height=“180” of upgrading my lab switch, which is the excellent Cisco SG300-20, I’ve not had a chance to update the firmware since it was released 6 months ago because of the downtime. For some reason I prefer configuring the SG300 from the command line - a hangover from my old networking days I suppose, but somehow it doesn’t feel right to me to use the GUI!

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).