Automated firmware updates bring us closer to a software defined data centre. The intelligence built into this feature removes some heavy lifting IT admins have to deal with.
Glenn Sizemore writes on the VMware Cloud Blog
The automated firmware update process has been enabled to expedite firmware updates within existing SDDC deployments. The process will add a new non-billable host to augment the cluster’s capacity. Once this new host is online and healthy, the service will initiate the firmware update process by first placing the host into maintenance mode, all workloads will be vMotioned to other hosts in the cluster, and then the host will be rebooted. Once the host is back online and confirmed healthy to run workloads, the non-billable host is removed. This activity will be logged in the SDDC activity log under ” Firmware update.”
To help convince the team to use this, consider sharing savings you can expect to gain and share it with management. After a few cycles of firmware updates, prove the saving out with concrete numbers.