Getting the EMC PowerPath VE plugin to work with VMware Update Manager

PowerPath/VE replaces the native mulipathing plugin which gives you incredible performance gains when managing your EMC Clariion SANs. You have to push this plugin to all your vSphere/ESX hosts to take advantage of it. Using VMware Update Manager is the easiest solution but I ran into a problem. Adding a 3rd party extension requires adding a patch repository in VUM and it only accepts web URLs. So I would have to setup a dedicated web server just for this patch repository which is ridiculous. Instead I decided to leverage my Virtual Center server itself since I knew it uses a Tomcat installation to display the vCenter web GUI and webservices. Some quick Googling and I found Joshua Townsend had the exact same idea and wrote a nice guide to do this already:

http://vmtoday.com/2010/02/installing-powerpathve-using-vmware-update-manager/

Once I set it up the way Joshua describes and pointed VUM to the patch repository URL hosted by vCenter, it worked perfectly. You will notice in my screenshot below Connectivity Status says “Connected” now.

Jason Samuel

Jason Samuel is a visionary product leader and trusted advisor with a proven track record of shaping strategy and driving technology innovation. With extensive expertise in enterprise end-user computing, security, cloud, automation, and virtualization technologies, Jason has become a globally recognized authority in the IT industry. His career spans consulting for hundreds of Fortune 500 enterprises across diverse business sectors worldwide, delivering cutting-edge digital solutions from Citrix, Microsoft, VMware, Amazon, Google, and NVIDIA that seamlessly balance security with exceptional user experiences.

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